BT 

ia\o 













































































































































































X° ^ ^ 

C‘ ,0^ s^ ,? <> 

* « f A v *V ^ - 

<35 



C*' > 

v^ ^ / c S < f/ \- or n _ . «■* <i v 

n N f Y > ^ 0- ☆ ^ ^ \ , 1 n ''^ O tj- \ -N^ rv N f. 

c ° 0 * o. X ^ N * L s x «?> *o v C o C <? 

<* O to v X /*>*_ *f ^ G * e^N\ 

-c '*"5!^ N* ^vT". ■, . < V.^jSS '•/* 



* s ' A 

,4 % ' « 1 '* 

A * m /r??p e 
^ *M//& 


vf A -. -; 

* , 0 f % ' V®T' % A <• 

v J = « 8 lw; ■ > b v* ; 

; _ *° ■**, * 

Ci_. i- 

^ - ■ 1 ' O V' , S * * T 

& 


- - 0 o f ° 0 s** r 'W* 

* cv ,9 V aV~ r * > V 

* ^ a O v <* 

f \ <3r 




^ * 3 H 0 ° A 

ff > V 

, <* ^ 


£ n 9 * 

> \\J 

V t » « 

4 iy s s 

<* > n A * 

° rj> V ° "_ 'A'\ 

• A% °wmr: ^ % . 

* - ^ V C V A' ^ * 

A <* A o "/ * * s 

^ A 1 » * ’<*> «A c 0 N ® ^ 


A <\> 


A A 

* ,<& 

* ,0 O 

0^ c » N ‘ » ' 

^ o^ : <* '' 

a °^. - 

v’;*l'>.\ -o' 



^ V 

Q^> " A o N 

A — N Xi* 


y "X-X--. * o > 

* 0 H 0 " 




* a* c> i- O •) 

’ v <-f, % 



« ~+p 

A, r ' V> .A. 

1°, -^* V ; 



^ a 9 

































*7 > . 

% °o 


A v* V * % 

A 1 'P 

05 


, 0 ? C 0 c ♦ * ^ 




mK « o > *> 

3 * ,0 ^ 

V \ * As s 

A A 3 ^ A A o*! 




s * rj^> * 5 H 0 ° \>^ * * * 0 /■ * * 1 A " o^ s s 







* "<fA 

feA % . °~ ,* 

«?>' *- o' ° 

fc - <5 ' 

> \ V * 

C • Ok • /- - ~ \ pv 

1 ’ v> V * " * 0 / *% ^ A * 

v, V-,A,#a> V A* * ' 



„« O- *. 

> A*AA^ 

^ A or in r ' **<?' 

: ^ 1 ° 


4 & ** ' 



A> k <2, 'I * * S S A 





•>" <& 

<2 r *> 


x 0 ^ 

\ ^ 



V- V 
0 

_=> <£> °<*‘ ^ 

0.0’“' ,/ %.“ AA>° s . „ , V» 0 

A, A \> £ ""JStBk * -*. 

* A\M/a ° z ^ v * 

v> ^ « A^ 1 ^ ° %:a?'\)? * 4 $ 

Af <r. •-SSIIS?' * - ^ ** sAs'a A' 

A V °0, A < . y 0 « X * A* , 

0^ t ° N ^ ^O % r Cp c 0 

C> * c _or^ % AJ> ^ "/ 0 . * 




^ t ** o* 





V 


. * . ~ 0 , 

W - * <7o,A- ^ * .0 w 0 ^ \V ^ 17 8 

v' v«’*»^ , <3 V s'**^, > V x »’‘*» c*. 

,v .. A '■■_ <■„ * S&h. *. % At- 


» ^ O 



^>, V' "T'.' A 

«, ^o. *“ A v « l ‘*- ^ 

• A O -P /K>5^, ^ ^ 

\ N #■ A A-, -p -A 




k ^ A 

e=^A « 1 *> 

" \° A * 

V A '^U J 

\ * \A V A. M O ' A 



'fV A 

0 


a? / . *A ' f > 

*> VA <S> * 

^ u ^ .V s - 

*N q N C . 

.0 V C 0 * O^ 

G 4 * ^ O 


y 0 * A . M , '^/- ’ i * * ^ a\ 



>. o A ^ 

c A '" \ N o 0 




V ^ ' - " t 'C 

A^# A % / ; 









































































* 



\ 

































































* 


























V 









l 










































n 



























• • 













































» 















































































































































































































- 















































Tom Paine on Trial, 


THE INFIDELS IN COURT. 


BROOKLYN: 

Published by D. S. HOLMES, 

89 Fourth St., Brooklyn, E. D. 

Sold by The Union News Company, 13 Park Place, N. Y. 


Price, 35 Cents. 












I 


THE BIBLE 

IN 

HARMONY WITH NATURE. 


ATHEISM ABNORMAL AND MONSTROUS. 


SPIRIT LIFE AND MATERIAL ENTITIES. 



By JOHN M. STEARNS, A.M., 

COUNSELLOR AT LAW. 



BROOKLYN: 

Published by D. S. HOLMES, 


89 Fourth St., Brooklyn, E. D. 



Sold by The Union News Company, 13 Park Place, N. Y. 


fy ?8'fl 




Entered in the Library of Congress, 1881, 
By JOHN M. STEARNS. 



PREFACE. 


The bold vulgarity of infidel ridicule has ceased its 
onsets on the religion of the Bible, and the work of up¬ 
setting the Christian faith of the ages is remitted to 
specious refinements in material philosophy, and the 
conceits of schools of scientists, whose dogmatic deliver¬ 
ances esteem the world as already converted to atheism. 

These scientists claim a large liberality in allowing 
Christians to demonstrate from the laws of physical na¬ 
ture, if they can, the truth of their doctrines. But 
their point of departure is the denial of the existence 
and phenomena of mind and soul as a part of nature. 
Spiritual life as a fact and identity within the scope of 
divine creations, as an entity in nature distinguished 
from matter, is the great fact on which is predicated the 
issues raised by these modern schools of materialists. 
Hence, the source of our convictions of the existence, 
office, and power of the spiritual and the divine will be 
considered and discussed in the following pages from 
every standpoint of reason and experience ; and our 
thoughts may be amplified and repeated, as we would 
dwell on the tones of an old familiar song with ever new 
delight. 



VI 


PREFACE. 


While Paine was cited as the high priest of deism 
during the last century, and while his attacks on the 
Bible are more specious and violent than those of others, 
we give a brief review, or rather consideration, of his 
attacks first in the following pages. 

Paine had a strong intellect, but it was vulgar and 
uncultured, while his temper seems to have been soured 
by infelicities in his domestic life. He made a separa¬ 
tion from his wife without any seeming cause, at the 
age of thirty-seven, and spent the remainder of his days 
as an adventurer in America and France. My convic¬ 
tions of truth and of the dangerous forces arrayed 
against it are my apology for claiming the attention of 
the public in these pages. They are as a legacy to 
youth whose wayward vanities seek relief from the re¬ 
straints. of law and virtue, and so easily fall into and 
adopt the sophistries of the carping infidel. 

Joeejs" M. Stearns. 

April 2, 1881. 


THE BIBLE IN HARMONY 
WITH NATURE. 


THOMAS PAINE AND THE BIBLE. 

Wedded to his conceits, with the pertinacity of a 
dogmatist, Paine would have fought revelation in any 
form in which it might come to the knowledge of men. 
But the rank atheism of modern infidelity has almost 
made the name of Paine with his religion of deism re¬ 
spectable. 

He knew less than the scientists, and the devil did 
not lead him so far astray. This was his creed : 

“ I believe in one God and no more, and I hope for 
happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of 
man, and I believe that religious duty consists in doing 
justice, loving mercy, and in endeavoring to make our 
fellow-beings happy.’’* 

* Franklin, who has sometimes been claimed as in accord with. 
Paine, entertained higher views of religious duty and worship, as 
is seen in the following from a letter to Whitefield : 

“ I am now in my eighty-fifth year, and very infirm. Here is my 
creed : I believe in one God, the Creator of the universe. That He 
governs by His providence. That He ought to be worshipped. ? 
That the most acceptable service we can render Him is by doing 
good to His other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and 
will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct 
in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound 
religion. ” 



8 


THE BIBLE IN’ HARMONY WITH NATURE. 


From his consciousness of personal identity, Paine 
believed in the future existence of the soul, but to what 
end does not appear by his writings. 

He held nature to be his Bible, and creation the only 
illustration of the divine. But like the scientists he 
saw nature only in matter, and shut his eyes to the great 
and glorious phenomena of the intellectual universe and 
the moral lights that illumine its skies. Mad with the 
developments of mind outside of the scope of his no¬ 
tions, what he saw of intellect in nature seemed always 
at war with his ideas of truth and facts. But we say 
that the development of humanity from ages before the 
flood in its intellectual faculties, varied phenomena, and 
as embracing forces and agencies that have moulded this 
our world to forms of beauty and grace, is as much a 
revelation of the God of nature as the stars in their 
courses. Would a wild, unpeopled world demonstrate 
more of the divine glory than the world when wrought 
by the intellectual millions bearing the forms of human¬ 
ity ? The harmony of nature would be lost if there was 
no eye to behold and no heart to admire its beauties. 
True, 

“ Full many a flower is bom to blush unseen, 

And waste its sweetness on the desert air 

but sadder still would be the aspect of nature if there 
were no heart in being to appreciate the sadness of such 
a thought. 

To ignore the intellectual and moral world, as a part 
of the divine economy of creation, is the pride and boast 
of infidelity. Its impudent speculations seek to upset 
the Deity in his works and government. 

The developed literature of the ancients, the schools 
of opinion, the universities, with their archives of an- 


THOMAS PAIHE A HD THE BIBLE. 


9 


tiquities, their treasures of knowledge, and the subsist¬ 
ing intellectual and moral status of man, are regarded by 
infidels as mere accidents in the condition of things, 
and not the developments of a supervising Providence. 

We come down to the incidents of humble life, to the 
experience of the millions, and admire the beauties of 
character in the most humble stations, and note the 
kindly sympathies of such with their fellows in suffer¬ 
ing, their domestic affections, and the kindly offices and 
duties toward each other, and find pictures whose moral 
beauties would command the admiration of angels. And 
yet the scientist in his gross appreciations sees in such 
no beauties but such as is common with the brute crea¬ 
tion. He would wipe out humanity in its higher facul¬ 
ties, and remit man to the condition of a mere animal, 
with no destiny but his present often painful experiences 
and his future annihilation. 

Still, with Thomas Paine, the scientist in the pride 
of his self-conceit labors hard and long to convince man 
of such miserable and comfortless doctrines. And why, 
as a general thing, are such labors so much in vain ? 
Opposing facts and forces resist such arguments, and. 
while there have been a few infidels and atheists in all 
ages they have had no numerous following. 

There is an element of religious sentiment inherent 
in man in all conditions and in all states of civilization. 
Its development, it is true, often illustrates a perverted 
nature, a depraved heart, and a degeneracy painfully in 
contrast with all that is good and noble and true ; yet 
the fact exists that the most rude and ignorant and 
savage have objects of worship outside of themselves to 
be feared and propitiated. The fetish of the rude Af¬ 
rican ; the Great Spirit of the Indian’s hunting lands ; 


10 THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 

the idols of Egypt and of Asia ; the spirits of the dead ; 
the sun, moon, and stars ; the bowers of sacred groves 
and forest solitudes have in their turn been objects of 
human worship. Even reptiles and monsters of the 
land and sea have coerced a reverence from human 
fears. Man has as natural affinity to some religion as 
to his kindred and species. Even Thomas Paine had 
a poetical inspiration from physical nature, and conceiv¬ 
ed a sort of cold, unsympathetic reverence for its au¬ 
thor ; if indeed this were not a conceit and delusion, 
and himself was not the true idol of his heart, on which 
he bestowed his warmest affections, and to which he 
rendered his most devout worship. 

With the religious element in man as developed in 
heathen countries, its perversion and human depravity 
are well proved, even without a revelation. In fact, 
“ The Age of Reason” shows Paine’s conviction of the 
depravity of man. Unless such were his convictions, 
he was one of the foulest slanderers human nature ever 
had. Few writers have charged their fellow-men with 
so great crimes. There is scarcely any crime or offence 
.known to criminal jurisprudence for which the “Age 
of Reason” has not brought an indictment, and as we 
may believe, in a majority of cases, against the guiltless. 

Paine being the witness, mankind in all ages have 
stood sadly in need of a divine revelation, and sadly de¬ 
praved in mind and morals. 

But embracing mind and its phenomena in the. scope 
of divine creations, like Paine’s theories, reasoning 
from nature up to nature’s God, we find the same affin¬ 
ity of the divine power and faculties with mind as with 
matter—with mind as it is or may be, as with matter 
and its laws. Nature in its varied developments, as 


THOMAS PAIHE A HD THE BIBLE. 


11 


Paine admits, is the subject of divine laws, and evi¬ 
dence of divine goodness. Then if man in his intel¬ 
lectual faculties and his soul exists by divine purpose, 
God is just as capable and competent to hold conference 
and communion with him as to originate his soul at 
first. 

Why should it he thought a thing incredible that God 
should hold converse with man ? Once admit that di¬ 
vine revelation is possible, and its obvious beneficial 
office for man renders it highly probable that such com¬ 
munications have been made. And as we believe, in the 
early ages of the race God developed His benevolence 
in frequent and varied communications of His will. 
And we may well believe that a thousand instances may 
have occurred of God’s appearing and conversing with 
men which have never found a record in sacred writings. 
God had devout worshippers from the time of the flood 
to the days of Abraham, when as yet no family or na¬ 
tion was specially chosen to represent his religion on 
earth. Job was apparently a stranger to the patriarchs 
of Jewish history; still he recorded the sublimest 
truths of nature and of God. 

If God so communicated His will directly to man, 
when such communications assumed the forms of hu¬ 
man speech they would come to those addressed in a 
form they could comprehend—in their rudeness and 
simplicity, in the crude and half-developed language of 
the ignorant, barbarous people. Men of the age of stone, 
and the lake-dwellers and the mound-builders, if they 
comprehended such communications at all, must have 
done so through the forms of speech of the crude ver¬ 
nacular of their several tribes. 

So the actual Bible that has come down to us is, with 


12 THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 

the divine truths it records and preserves, a transcript 
of the civilization, progress, or barbarism of those to 
whom it was first communicated. 

In the conceits of men, the method prescribed for rev¬ 
elation is for God to transform men to the patterns of 
hallowed proprieties, and then to have made them chan¬ 
nels of his divine communications. But nothing is 
farther from the truth. He spake to Cain while Cain 
was in the guilt of his brother’s blood. He pronounced 
sentence of banishment on the first great progenitors of 
our race after their fall with words of prophecy and 
promise. He spake familiarly to Moses while the great 
lawgiver was livid with anger at the perversity of the 
people. 

It was through men of infirmities that our existing 
Bible was communicated to the world. And it was 
through men of infirmities that it has survived the ages, 
and is preserved to us as our teacher in the knowledge 
of the way of life. 

Paine’s labored attack on the Bible, because a few 
glosses from later writers have been transcribed by copy¬ 
ists into the ancient text, shows his malice and lack of 
candor in his boasted “ Age of Beason. ’ ’ Divine revela¬ 
tion or its records survive in the Bible, while it bears 
evidence of the state of intelligence at the periods of 
their being written, and present pictures of rude 
and barbarous times, and here approve of a policy 
only consistent with such a state of civilization. The 
policy which alone would realize the ends sought 
through the acts and agencies of the then existing gen¬ 
erations may appear cruel in the light of subsequent 
ages ; still, the inspiration is there, however the records 
brought to us be of acts that in us might bo crimes, 


THOMAS PAIHE AKD THE BIBLE. 


13 


and in nations as well, where the cruelties of barbarous 
war are not the only subsisting means to realize the de¬ 
signs of Providence. God has not made man a mira¬ 
cle. But whatever the natural and moral conditions of 
the race may he, the light of his everlasting truth is 
not withheld from the rudest or most enlightened. 
Revelation meets the race as it finds them. The rude 
Hottentot; the brutal Hew Hollander ; the dwellers on 
the ice-bound plains of Greenland or the fiords of Ice¬ 
land ; the African with his fetish worship by the un¬ 
traversed jungles of the dark continent ; the polite phi¬ 
losophers of France ; the plodding scholar of Germany ; 
the strong-minded in burly rustic thought in our an¬ 
cient England and Scotland—all these find God’s reve¬ 
lation a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of 
the celestial world ; brought down to the palace and the 
cottage, to the halls of learning, and the shepherd in 
his mountain home. 

Says Paine: “The Bible is fragmentary, and in 
some cases shows contradictions and absurdity. ” But 
we say, while it seems to have been the divine pur¬ 
pose that the principles developed in God’s divine com¬ 
munications to man 'should survive through the ages, 
and continue while nations might rise and fall, even 
amid conflicts and wars, and become an effectual power 
to subdue sin, to re-create the world in a new life, till 
millennial glory shall illumine its valleys and hills, still 
the records of this sacred word were left in the hands 
of men, not always inspired, in their keeping and pres¬ 
ervation. So that in the long centuries many things 
may have perished, and the tooth of time have obliterated 
words and phrases that at first rounded out to com¬ 
pleteness the sacred visions. It is enough for me that 


14 THE BIBLE IH HARMOHY WITH KATURE. 


one great sclieme of the divine economy is developed by 
the Bible in unity and harmony during more than forty 
centuries, transpiring from the fall of man in Eden 
to the resurrection of Christ and his ascension to 
heaven. 

Man’s dark days, as he went out demoralized and de¬ 
graded from Eden, with the dim and shadowy hope, in¬ 
spired by what was to him the obscure promises of God, 
shows the inception and development of those great an¬ 
tagonisms between law and sin, and between the sinner 
condemned and divine mercy, that subsist to the present 
hour. The sin and depravity that came on the scene so 
early in the world’s history brought forth and per¬ 
petuated its penalty and sorrows to a suffering world. 
So that at this hour we need no Scripture evidence of 
human depravity. We see it in its developments in 
every nation, kindred, tongue, and people, while at the 
same time the Bible develops purposes of mercy toward 
sin-ruined man. In all the incidents of sacred history, 
such purposes shine forth amid scenes of darkness and 
suffering. In those old prophetic days, when clouds 
and flaming fire rushed over the sombre sky, seemingly 
portending the destruction of a guilty land, the storm 
goes by, and God’s bow in the clouds, hung on the re¬ 
treating tempest, becomes an illumination of joy and 
hope, of promise and peace and salvation. This sacred 
chronicle, while rehearsing the vices of kings and the 
degeneracy of the people, looks out from the degrada¬ 
tion toward the standards of truth and righteousness, 
toward the hallowed scenes of a new heaven and a new 
earth wherein righteousness dwelleth. The great 
prophetic vision of Emanuel, God with us, Christ the 
Redeemer, is inwrought as a mosaic in all these Sacred 


THOMAS PAINTE AND THE BIBLE. 


15 


Scriptures, from the earliest times to the advent and min¬ 
istry of the Messiah. The 53d chapter of Isaiah is a word- 
portrait of Jesus. And that it has come down to us as 
well in the Bible of the Jews as in that used by Christians 
is evidence of the integrity of the Sacred Scriptures. 
This prophecy was not interpolated by Jewish rabbis 
to support Christianity as against the dogmas of the 
Jewish religion. But it was sung by the inspiration that 
“ touched Isaiah’s hallowed lips with fire,” more than 
six hundred years before Christ was born. But I need 
not dwell on the principles of the religion we love, as 
illustrated and wrought through the ages, and elabo¬ 
rated and taught by our Saviour on earth, as predicated 
on the sacred teachings of Moses and the prophets. 
For this is an old story, wrought in the pathos of life 
and celestial joy. Paine himself, with Rousseau, can¬ 
not withhold his admiration of the character and prin¬ 
ciples of the Saviour’s teachings ; as Rousseau has 
been so often quoted as saying, “ Socrates died like a 
philosopher, but Jesus Christ like a God.” In fact, the 
Gospel in its truth and intendments covers all the 
ages, relates back to the beginning of the world, and 
comes down to the day when the earth itself shall pass 
away, and there shall be no more sea. Yea, it shall 
bring its redeemed souls to their consecrated and con¬ 
gregated jubilee, whose assembly no man can number in 
the skies. Finally, in Christianity we see a system of 
truth adapted to the condition of all human hearts, in 
the present and in the past. And while Paine’s Bible 
was nature, man in his intellectual faculties- and moral 
appreciations is as high a demonstration of God’s works 
as the cold moonbeams in a December night, and the 
stars hiding in blue obscurity in far-off skies. Let us, 


16 


THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 


then, receive God’s truth, and so demonstrate that we? 
live in an age of reason. 

But I would add one thought more. The principles 
on which divine law and human responsibility are 
predicated are shadowed in human character and condi¬ 
tions. God has revealed the destruction and misery of 
the wicked. But suppose he had made no such revela¬ 
tion, what prestige of heaven could we find in the per- 
severingly and pertinaciously wicked ? Hearts steeped 
in selfishness and crime lack the first element of being 
fitting the soul for the enjoyment of heaven. On the 
contrary, a heart devoted to benevolence and charity 
fulfils a condition of future life and blessedness. Na¬ 
ture, Paine says, is Bible enough to teach him. So it 
might be, if matter and mental conditions were con¬ 
sidered a part of nature to teach the unfitness of man 
for heaven without regeneration and a new life. But 
revelation came in to open up the paths of peace, and 
to lead the ruined and the lost to those conditions pre¬ 
cedent to the destiny of saints in glory. Revelation is 
indeed the adaptation of truth to human needs, and 
takes up man as a wayward stranger to God, and leads 
him to Mount Zion. 

But recognizing the consistent teachings of nature 
and revelation, we do not repudiate the office of faith— 
of faith which is the key of knowledge, the key of life, 
as Bunyan said, that can unlock any door in Doubting 
Castle. 

Nature and revelation in the eye of faith become as 
things of life—let the human heart into the great 
world of Providence and grace, and into the light of 
celestial skies, and the glories and beauties of heaven. 
Through faith we know the fact of revelation, and also 


“WHAT IS TRUTH ?” 


17 


of things revealed. Paine says the prophets were sim¬ 
ply poets. If they were, their sublime songs were 
things of substance—a part of nature, which he pro¬ 
fessed to revere—of nature developed as a prestige of 
immortality. 


“WHAT IS TRUTH?” 

It is difficult to tell if James Anthony Froude, in 
his discussion of religion in a late number of the Inter¬ 
national Review , intended to champion the atheism of 
Lucretius, or only to upset the accepted foundations of 
the Christian faith. Pilate, who was doubtless of the 
Epicurean school of philosophy, inquired, “What is 
truth?” when Christ signified that he, Christ, was its 
teacher, embodiment, and impersonation. This in¬ 
quiry would have had a more marked significance had 
the Roman governor been listening to Mr. Froude’s his¬ 
torical dissertations. 

That religion has place in the world seems to be ad¬ 
mitted by this writer, while at the same time he seems 
to seek to confound all systems, whether Pagan, Jew, 
Christian, or Mohammedan, and seems to regard them 
as predicated on mistake and delusion, and of question¬ 
able utility in the interests of the race. Still he con¬ 
cedes that the elemental facts of religion are indigenous 
and of perpetual existence in the world. With a cant 
of disparagement toward religion as it is and has been, 
he concludes his essay with these words : 

“ That the truth which is in religion will assert itself 
again, as it asserted itself before. A society without 
God in the heart of it is not permitted to exist. And 



18 


THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 


when once more a spiritual creed has established itself 
which men can act on in their lives and believe with 
their whole souls, it is to he hoped that they will have 
grown wiser by experience, and will not again leave the 
most precious of their possessions to he ruined by the 
extravagances of exaggerating credulity/’ 

It is perhaps easy to write a critique on religion, in its 
forms, theories, and developments, while disowning al¬ 
legiance to either and to all. But the complacent ego¬ 
tism or conceit that these specious philosophers have 
already upset the religious faith of the world is too im¬ 
pudent for toleration. • i 

Bold atheism has at different ages cropped out for a 
time through the strata of religious ideas, that in one 
form or other pervade all lands ; but while it boasted that 
the world was in its grasp, its voice has died upon the 
winds, and its champions of half a score have retired in 
disgust to some wild retreat to devise and elaborate eu¬ 
logies of mutual admiration of each other’s greatness. 
And when the world has had rest in its religions for a 
century again, the select few conceited men, who fancy 
they are wiser than the divine, appear again upon the 
stage with comet illuminations to blaze for a day and then 
to fall into Cimmerian night. The charge of hypoc¬ 
risy upon the religion of this age is made by this infidel 
school in its raid on the religious world to-day. Says 
Froude : 

‘‘The religious mind has set itself with all its might 
to make things seem what they are not, and to turn 
back the river of destiny to its sacred fountains.” 

And then this writer rejoices that the once abhorred 
principles of the French Revolution have been adopted 
as the rule of political action, even in conservative Eng- 



“ WHAT IS TRUTH ?” 


19 


land ; that Jeremy Bentham stands in history as a po¬ 
litical prophet; that the ends of civil government are 
restricted to the material welfare of the people ; that 
the will of God has no more a place, even by courtesy, 
in our modern statutes. We are astonished at these 
assumptions without a shadow of truth. But to limit 
these quotations : are the propositions stated true ? Or 
are they the expression of arrogant conceits of modern 
infidelity ? The world, with all its impiety, still recog¬ 
nizes religion as a power and a perpetual life ; while 
atheism, with its few adherents and champions, con¬ 
cedes that the few only can appreciate its pretensions ; 
and its popular triumph, if to he realized at all, is in 
the far-off future. 

The pivot on which the infidel school rest their sys¬ 
tem is the denial of spiritual life, abstract of material 
entities. Were this point well taken, it does not follow 
that their gross conceptions have discovered or appreci¬ 
ated all the forms and combinations of matter and life, 
to exclude the possibility of the eternal existence of the 
human soul, and its capacity of joy and bliss in a celes¬ 
tial inheritance. But the scientist, with all his preten¬ 
tious knowledge, is but a tyro in the real philosophy of 
nature. He has dug a mile into the bowels of the earth, 
and has ascended as high toward the stars, and has 
measured the depth of the ocean. But the solid earth, 
has yet four thousand miles of depth unseen to reach 
its centre. And if man floats away to the stars, what 
shall be the way-marks of his progress, and what the 
phenomena of such distant burning worlds ? The de¬ 
velopments of electricity as a power in nature are in¬ 
deed among the wonders of this age. But beyond cer¬ 
tain laws illustrated by experiments of the operation of 


20 


THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 


this subtle element, by which it has been appropriated 
to serve us to useful ends, what do the most learned 
know of the intrinsic qualities of electricity ?—whether it 
be matter, or something kindred to the pantheist’s God, 
the soul of the world ?—whether it be matter, or a mere 
development of forces, by the affinities of material sub¬ 
stances in their relations and conditions ? The discov¬ 
eries in electricity are indeed the glory of modern phi¬ 
losophy. Still, we scarcely know more of nature to-day 
than was known when the Psalmist sang of “ God on 
the wings of the wind, whose pavilion round about, 
him were dark waters and thick clouds of the sky” ; or 
when Job was silent at the reproofs of wisdom, in the 
divine inquiries as to the secret mysteries of nature. 
And your profound scientist knows nothing more to¬ 
day of the distinctness of species and -the secrets of 
generation than is stated in the records of the world’s 
creation. While nature has phenomena in which the 
agency of matter is neither seen nor can be defined, 
cropping out of the mysteries of embryo that are devel¬ 
oped and born as the seeming working power of the 
material universe, how can the scientist know that all 
the forces of nature can be predicated on material en¬ 
tities, or that some of them may not proceed from rec¬ 
ondite, unseen sources, deeper and far more refined 
than the most infinitesimal monad that subsists as the 
substratum of material things ? 

> But though the philosopher may affect to have a pvo¬ 
ces verbal to direct the stars in their courses, and to 
define the detonating fires whose forces shake the 
mountain heights and set in motion the solid earth, so 
that new-made cities crumble and fall; or to limit the 
lightning’s power, and put to quiet sleep the thunders 


“ WHAT IS TRUTH ?” 


21 


in the sky—he is at sea, confused and lost at the very 
threshold of the world of life ! Life, indeed : what is 
it? whence was it? and its destiny? Even the faint¬ 
est instincts of sentient beings, for all these sages know, 
are without a father. The origin of life is as great a 
mystery to-day as when creation’s morning first smiled 
on the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, and 
lighted the way of the fishes in the great deep. Those 
who sneer at the simple story of creation can give no 
such rational views of the origin of life and the sources 
and successions of species as are set forth in that narra¬ 
tive. 

It is sometimes said, The Bible rests its claims to 
credence and authority on faith alone. But why so, 
where nature shows conditions in the status of things, 
that without the counterparts brought to view in the 
Bible would leave the world to fall to chaos and ruin ? 
Bible truths, as supplementing nature’s teachings, go 
to make up a system of philosophy that can defy the 
scepticism of the ages. 

“ God breathed into man the breath of life, and man 
became a living soul.” Who can tell more of why and 
what man is to-day? Here we are referred to a suffi¬ 
cient and consistent origin of man—in his mind, his fac¬ 
ulties, his passions, and endowments. This statement 
embraces a great fact in philosophy, without which no 
consistent body of truth could be seen or appreciated 
with respect to man. This great fact, precedent to hu¬ 
man experience, is as a light to man’s pathway from the 
cradle to the grave. 

The very consciousness of the human soul certifies its 
independent life in distinction from the body in which 
it dwells. The “ me” and “ not me” in human con- 


22 THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 

cepfcions rest not in the body or form or personal iden¬ 
tity of the individual man, but in the consciousness of 
life and power, and of the identity of the soul. 

With such an origin of human life, the intellectual 
and moral world finds its precedents and prestige. From 
this standpoint we can tell why the earliest memories 
of childhood were the thought of our conscious being, 
and why an idea of the beautiful claimed our interest in 
the scenes around us. We plucked the flowers of 
spring, and watched the forest leaves from the green of 
June to fading autumn. Though yet beautiful in va¬ 
ried hues, the dying year had charms for our childhood 
soul; we see the reason why the love of nature’s scenes 
became the poetry of our childhood’s heart. 

The summeT-night dream was a reality in our life’s 
early days, when the sun seemed to walk majestic in 
the sky, and the moon, the queen of night, led the 
starry host, that without a cloud shone forth as gems 
in the brow of night; or when the storm was passed, 
and the rainbow in all its beautiful hues sent down its 
feet to the earth, why was our childhood impressed 
with a wish to dwell where those beautiful colors might 
be the light of our home ? 

If all these charms are phantoms, illustrating the 
capacity of the human soul for appreciation and enjoy¬ 
ment of what does not exist, or what will vanish to thin 
air or blackness in the changes of time, where is the 
philosophical harmony in the relations of things ? and 
where is the integrity of nature as presented to the con¬ 
ceptions of man? Was nature made a lie in planting, 
nurturing, and elaborating these poetic visions in the 
human soul, and then, by blotting them out forever, 
leaving the heart to despair and desolation ? Is it not 


“ WHAT IS TRUTH ?” 


23 


more consistent to believe, as much by natural necessity 
as by faith, that these illuminations are but the shimmer- 
ings of light from the celestial world ; that while man 
appreciates their refinement and beauty, they may not be 
to him as the phantoms of an hour, but the prestige of 
an eternal enjoyment of beauty and glory? So in the 
individual experience of human life, man would find 
the scientist the greatest fraud in the universe. In 
fact, something must be eliminated out of man—the 
soul, its faculties and appreciations—before the machin¬ 
ery of atheism will run at all in the grooves of its phi¬ 
losophy. 

Human motives gathered from the experience of the 
past and hopes for the future give shape to human for¬ 
tune and prestige to human destiny. St. Paul says 
truly : “If in this life only we have hope, we are of all 
men most miserable.” 

It is the greatest absurdity to assert that such a sys¬ 
tem of thought and faith as religion develops in man 
is without an influence on human ideas and human 
character. In fact, one of the positive forces that 
shape the character of nations is their notion of re¬ 
ligion. The only test we need of the truth of the re¬ 
ligion of the ancient Jews and the modern Christian is 
the scope they have filled in human civilization. It is 
one of the miracles of history that the descendants of 
Israel, a thousand years before the bloody code of the 
twelve tables of Kome found a profert, that settled laws 
of the Mosaic code effected their beneficent work of re¬ 
fining and civilizing the rude pastoral people in their 
journey through the wilderness, and when they became 
denizens of the promised land. Seven hundred years 
before Eome was born, and while the lake-dwellers hid 


24 THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 

away on the sylvan, shaded waters among Alpine moun¬ 
tains, this law was proclaimed at the foot of Sinai, 
and the civil responsibilities as well as the religious du¬ 
ties of the people were declared and set forth. In fact, 
so perfect a system of laws and so well adapted to mat¬ 
ters of civil police is scarcely found in any other an¬ 
cient nation. The great Alfred of England copied 
many of these laws verbatim as a great improvement on 
the old Saxon codes. 

But not its code of laws alone tested the civilization 
of the Jewish state. It was a land of religion and a 
land of song, and a sublime pathos of eloquence was 
wrought into all its sacred history. Even as captives in 
a strange land, its people wrought in melancholy re¬ 
frains their memory of the nation’s greatness and glory. 

But what in the old Hebrew days was in some sense 
dark and obscure, when illustrated by the advent of the 
Messiah became as the light of life to the future ages. 
Christ in his mission to earth—in his gentleness, kind¬ 
ness, and beneficence, in his very silence—acted the pan¬ 
tomime of celestial life. But when the sentiments of 
his heart found expression there was a dignity, an as¬ 
surance, a force of authority and integrity from which 
the sceptic fled away. The ethics of his teachings were 
so in reproof of selfish men that even infidels have 
dropped their pens of reproach and indulged in pathos 
of wonder and admiration. Even Kousseau is credited 
with saying, “ Socrates died like a philosopher, but 
Jesus Christ like a Cod. ” And how otherwise should he 
die, whose death wrought an atonement for the world ? 

Since the propagation of Christianity through the 
nations, in its charities, its sympathies, its promises, and 
hopes, it has developed a civilization in human govern- 


“ WHAT IS TRUTH ?” 


25 


ments and in hnman affairs and in nations subject to 
its influence that have no precedents elsewhere in time 
or on the earth. 

But every investigation of nature comes up to neces¬ 
sities that nature in its manifest conditions fails to 
provide for. Life needs an origin, the world a con¬ 
structor ; the universe needs laws ; man needs a coun¬ 
terpart to his nature and his experiences. All these 
needs as met are pointed out by the teachings of the 
Bible. The remedies which divine wisdom hath or¬ 
dained for the supply of every want are found in the 
truth and grace of God. And for this we will sing, 
“ Glory to God in the highest; on earth peace, and 
good-will to men !” 

The last necessity which the instincts of our being 
impress on our attention is an assurance at the day of 
our death, of another life, befitting the instincts, the 
faculties, and appreciations of the soul. And “ life 
and immortality are brought to light through the gos¬ 
pel. ’ 9 At such an hour, what would the assurance of 
'Lucretius be worth : “ That the soul is about to vanish 
into smoke, and will not be.” But why is he found 
reproving his friends who at the bed of the dying man¬ 
ifest the instincts of nature, in expressing interest in 
the soul of their friend ? For me, give me the faith of 
the Christian and a believing assurance of a coming par¬ 
adise, to the cold death-chill of the philosophy of the 
atheist ! While nature is indeed in harmony with 
things of faith, our groping after truth to the borders 
of the unknown and beyond develops but faint shad¬ 
ows of the things, the substances, the forces, on which 
we predicate the phenomena of nature. Our conclu¬ 
sions are and must be incomplete and unsatisfactory. 


26 


THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 


It is only when we have mastered faith—faith that 
seizes on demonstrated necessities and shows to the .con¬ 
ceptions, the grand old truths of the spiritual world, 
that round out the harmonies of being—that we see the 
greatness and glory of God and nature. 

Faith leads us to a standpoint where we can see God 
in the spirit of his being, in the joys of his eternal 
goodness, in the grandeur of his spiritual character, in 
liis boundless power while as yet the universe was not. 
In him was a power adequate to creation, not of the 
visible universe around us only, but of heaven in its 
beauties, and to people it with the just, redeemed, and 
sanctified from the children of men. Faith also devel¬ 
ops to us the religion God has appointed to glorify 
himself in the surroundings of celestial life. Yes, 
faith lifts the veil from all the mysteries and destiny of 
man’s being, showing that heaven and man’s existence 
in eternity is the counterpart of his life and being on 
earth ; that his pilgrimage here is but a journey to the 
skies ; that his aspirations for knowledge will be satis¬ 
fied in the light and truth that reign in the celestial 
world. While here, “ the eye hath not seen, nor ear 
heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to con¬ 
ceive the things that God has prepared for those that 
love him.” But there we shall see God in all the 
glory of his being, and as demonstrating in tablets 
written on celestial skies his own everlasting truth. 
There, indeed, we shall find the answer to Pilate’s in¬ 
quiry, “ What is truth ?” in the blaze of ineffable 
glory that overarches that flowery land; in the an¬ 
thems of praise to God and the Lamb whose chorus is 
no melancholy refrain from the abodes of the dead ; 
but the heart and voices of that great multitude which 


“WHAT is TRUTH ?’ 5 


27 


no man can number, redeemed and gathered from every 
nation, tongue, and people. 

But when we have mastered faith, or when faith has 
become an integral element in a system of things mak¬ 
ing up the moral and intellectual universe, we see the 
forces that influence the living and working world. 
The duties of an holy life are wrought under the inspi¬ 
ration of divine truth, while the seething caldron of 
the world’s corruptions develops the vices and crimes 
and conditions that people hell with the damned. 

But faith points out the way of life to all. Under 
its illuminations our sorrows are turned to joy, and the 
valley and the shadow of death flee away. The faint 
conceptions of the heavenly state become elaborated to 
the visions of that city which hath foundations whose 
builder and maker is God, to that land of beauty where 
flowers perennial grow, and where flows that pure river 
of the water of life that proceedeth from the throne of 
God and the Lamb—that land of joy and song, of 
thought and progress, upward through the ages. Yes, 
when faith unlocks the vision of the skies we see our 
standing there. 

With angels we praise 
The Ancient of Days, 

And saints are joined in the song ; 

And Christ in His glory 
Is the song and the story : 

Roll, roll your anthems along ! 

Hallelnjah to the Lord ! 

Catch the soft word, 

And sing Hallelnjah again ; 

Onr praises we bring 
To onr Redeemer and King, 

No more to die in refrain. 


28 


THE BIBLE IH HARMOHY WITH HATURE. 


But coming down from these heavenly ecstasies to the 
sober experiences of this mortal life, to realize the lights 
and shadows of time and the joys and sorrows which il¬ 
luminate or cloud the world, faith is still the represent¬ 
ative of everlasting truth, enabling us to exclaim, in 
the midst of our sorrows, with ancient Job : 

“ I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall 
stand at the latter day upon the earth ; though after my 
skin, worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall 
see God, whom I shall see for myself ; and mine eyes 
shall behold, and not another.’’ 


THE PRIMITIVE CREATION. 

“ In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And 
the earth was without form, and void ; and darkness was upon the 
face of the deep.” —Genesis 1 :1. 

The question of the eternal durability of matter has 
been a subject of controversy for ages. The experiments 
to show the chemical and commercial equivalents, pro¬ 
duced by the changes in the conditions and forms in 
nature, are claimed to be proofs of the affirmative of 
this question. But the limit and grossness of human 
perceptions and computation in these experiments ren¬ 
der them inconclusive in the apparent results. Be¬ 
sides, the cropping out of hidden or half-developed mys¬ 
teries in the phenomena attending all the operations of 
nature render human conclusions in the premises yague 
and uncertain. 

It is admitted that the terms of the sacred narrative 
of the creation might be construed as relating to the 



THE PRIMITIVE CREATION. 


29 


formation, out of matter subsisting, of the universe of 
worlds. But this is not the obvious construction of 
the language used, nor within its seeming intendments,. 
Besides, it would detract from the sum and measure of 
divine power to deny its ability to create matter, even 
out of nothing. The term used, or its equivalent, in 
the translation—“ created”—implies such an origin of 
matter—the causing to exist that which did not exist 
before. It is obvious, however, that the veriest monads 
of body and substance existed by the divine volition, 
and became as pervading ether in the realms of space, 
before their agglomeration into worlds and systems of 
worlds. The progress of such process in the formation 
of our earth is sufficiently apparent as the narrative is 
continued. The earth was without form and void, 
“ empty and desolate an agglomeration of fluids, con¬ 
centrating a more solid centre, surrounded by fluids 
diminishing in density to the lightest ether in surround¬ 
ing skies, without marked distinctions between water 
and air and the scarcely appreciable ether in space above 
and beyond. The spirit of God “ brooded ” on the face 
of the waters. Natural phenomena there were, and 
natural laws emanating from the divine will, attached 
to matter and its forms. But the same power that 
created matter at first still operated in its laws and 
combinations — still brooded, as a hen protects her 
young, over the inchoate and forming worlds. 

Time is not an element in this account of the primi¬ 
tive creation. Hence, until it is declared that the 
evening and the morning were the first day, the contro¬ 
versy as to the duration of the work of creation does 
not arise. Creation, though a seeming miracle to us, 
was no miracle in itself ; for a miracle implies the 


30 THE BIBLE IX HARMONY WITH NATURE. 

special or temporary suspension of a natural law, and 
natural law had being only when nature itself was born. 
And for all that transpired after the creation of matter, 
the laws of nature, by direction of the divine will, 
wrought out every phenomenon developed in material 
things. Still, every new element in nature was evolved, 
as matter was at first, by the immediate force of the 
divine will. So of animal creation, and so of the crea¬ 
tion of man. God said, Let there be light, and light was 
—an illuminating power by the divine will attached to 
certain elements in nature. So the chemical affinities 
of the elements of water were made to operate so as to 
divide the waters from the fluids above the firmament; 
that is, from air and ether and vacuity. 

Species in the animal and vegetable world, and the 
laws of their several generations, can be accounted for 
in their origin, on no known law of matter, or other¬ 
wise, except on the necessary theory of each being a 
special divine creation. So says the Mosaic Scripture. 
God commanded the earth to bring forth grass and 
trees, (i whose seed was in itself ” ; so the laws of genera¬ 
tion in the vegetable world followed the original crea¬ 
tion of each and every kind of vegetable life. So in 
the animated nature. The same species that were cre¬ 
ated at first, bear the same distinctive characteristics 
to-day. Even the old bones dug out from the marl-pit, 
and claimed to have slumbered there for uncounted 
ages, are the exact transcripts of the living skeletons of 
like species of to-day. The expert naturalist from a 
single jaw-bone can reconstruct the donkey in the skele¬ 
ton form, as it bore its burdens in days before the flood. 
So in the human bones dug out of caves, where they 
have slumbered since the age of stone. 


THE PRIMITIVE CREATION. 


31 


The theory of progressive development of animal life 
from vegetable, and from one species of animal to. 
another, is against all the observed facts and laws of 
natural phenomena. The archaeologist finds as distinc¬ 
tive marks of species of animal and vegetable life in the 
oldest fragments dug out from the site of lost and name¬ 
less cities as in the now living world. Species of birds, 
fishes, and beasts have doubtless lived and become ex¬ 
tinct when the changed condition of the world no longer 
afforded them sustenance. But while these species re¬ 
mained, they neither changed in character nor condi¬ 
tion. A mammoth’s bones, dug up at the Big Licks, 
on the Ohio, are obviously kindred in form and confor¬ 
mation to those that have been preserved in the ice 
mountains of Siberia. So as to the vast leviathans 
whose skeleton forms are concrete in rocks once washed 
by ancient seas. 

Life , like matter, is a subject of primitive divine crea¬ 
tion, whether it pertain to vegetables, animals, or man. 
It is a higher species of existence than matter, and no 
conditions or combinations of matter will produce a liv¬ 
ing species of being, except by the laws of natural 
generation. Matter, in itself, cannot produce a primi¬ 
tive creation of life. Unless the Scripture account of 
creation is accepted, the observations of an unnatural 
speculation in the premises would be endless. What is 
true of the origin of the substratum of living species, as 
the creation of G-od, is pre-eminently true of man in his 
mind and soul, or higher life. God created man in his 
own image, and breathed into him the breath of life, and 
man became a living soul. This account of the creation 
of man cannot be improved or controverted. It points 
to an adequate source of those endowments, in his primi- 


32 THE BIBLE IK HABMOHY WITH KATUBE. 

tiye being, that could not have emanated from matter 
alone, or its combinations, or have been developed from 
a lower cast of vitality. Grod breathed into him the 
breath of life, and man became a living soul. This 
tells all we need to know of man’s primitive being. 
How simple ! and yet how sublime ! showing the found¬ 
ation of man’s relation to G-od. A child of the skies, 
he owes a primitive allegiance to his Divine Father. 
Though fallen by sin, he no less needs a renewed com¬ 
munion with the divine, to appreciate his sublime ori¬ 
gin, and the source of relief from the power of sin. A 
creature of sympathy, he feels a consciousness of life and 
of affections that certifies the convictions and offices of 
an immortal being. What say the very instincts of the 
human soul ? That man, though bearing a form of clay, 
bears also the incidents of life and immortality. Look 
on this picture, and then on that—the clay-wrought 
effigy of manhood, and man in the endowments of his 
life and being. 

You cannot reason man’s existence as he is, out of 
mere matter and form. God, in his creating power, is 
the complement of being and life to all created things. 
Physical nature degenerates downward, instead of devel¬ 
oping to a higher status, condition, or character. But a 
divine hand mends, matures, and cultures creation to the 
ends of its appointed destiny. Grod can give life to the 
dead, energy to the feeble and frail, force where only 
weakness existed before, and, in fine, perfect the defects 
and deficiencies of creation. Without such a source and 
fountain of life and power, all reasonings from physical 
nature up to its highest conditions will run into ab¬ 
surdity. You cannot bring the greater out of the less 
—life out of matter, nor mind nor soul out of the mere 


THE PRIMITIVE CREATION. 


33 


instincts of vitality. They all had a creator, and their 
creator is God—God, who lived and acted when matter 
was an unknown fact or thought; God, whose great, 
vast universe was conceived only in his divine appre¬ 
ciations, with light seen only by eyes divine. The 
panorama of the coming creation was as a vision of thin 
air and nothingness, and yet to he of substance in the 
worlds unborn. 

To such an author of nature we bow and worship. 
And, as Christian men, we recognize the Son of an 
eternal generation, by whom God made the worlds. Let 
infidels rage, and scientists retire to their misty dark¬ 
ness. Though we can reason as effectually as they, yet 
with faith and worship we will adore the Father and 
the Son, as seen in the celestial mechanics of creation. 
We will sing the oratorio of creation with the morning 
stars. While the past in its glories shall float in vision, 
as the music of the spheres we will sing of him who 
has promised to create a new heaven and a new earth 
wherein dwelleth righteousness; where landscapes rich 
and green shall be reflected in their beauties by the 
pure river of the water of life; where the tree whose 
leaves are for the healing of the nations shall shade and 
beautify the celestial land. But the pathos of ecstasy 
at these sublime visions must yield to the contests of 
this hour, while we meet with bold hand the specula¬ 
tions of philosophy and the subtleties of infidelity. 

To conceive of nature subject in its development to 
chance , excludes the idea of a divine intelligence in the 
creation and operation of natural law. Either there is 
a divine intelligence that has to do with the operation 
of nature, or there is not. If not, then, indeed, is 
nature without law ; because all law presupposes an 


34 THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 


adequate power or force, not only for its creation, but 
to give it effect in its office. Now, if there be no law 
given, there can be no operative laws, and chance holds 
in its uncertain tenure the fate of the universe. But is 
such a thought comfortable, as compared with the con¬ 
ception of the universal intelligent government of 
Providence ? 

If the mere chance combinations of matter have pro¬ 
duced the varied species of animal and vegetable life, 
what warrant have we that future creations of species 
will not be at war with and destructive of those that 
now exist ? What experience or reasoning shall assure 
us against such possibilities ? Salamanders would no 
longer be myths of human fancies and fable, and the 
fires of the volcanoes might teem with active life ; and 
monster forms, breathing lurid flames, might range the 
world at will. We would need no Dante’s visions of the 
damned; and he of the fortieth circle downward in 
the ranks of devils lost would be the fearful terror of 
our mountains, hills, and vales. The worm that Pol¬ 
lock saw, as that which never dies, might leave the marl 
of hell and become the free denizen of this our beauti¬ 
ful world. In fine, who can tell what monster forms 
by the chances of nature would be begotten and born ? 
What fearful shapes, what eyes ever rolling fire, or 
what progeny of devilish shapes from Stygian pools 
might generate, and come and people every land ! 
What deadly scenes, what terror and desolations, would 
then survive, and overshadow the grave of the last being 
that now seems to live under the providence of God ! 
To such desolation would the votaries of chance and 
infidelity bring the beautiful creations of the divine 
hand. Exclude for a moment God’s supervision, wis- 


THE SCIENTIST AND THE MAN OF THE BIBLE. 35 


dom, and government, and we make it possible for any 
and every conceivable species of being to spring into 
existence, and to torment the world. 


THE SCIENTIST AND THE MAN OF THE 
BIBLE. 

The origin, conditions and relations of man are 
problems on which are predicated conclusions of vast 
and vital interest. The scientist, with meagre facts, 
assumes very doubtful conclusions. He seeks to ex¬ 
hume prehistoric ages to find a fossil that once sub¬ 
sisted as an organism of man’s natural life, as the pro¬ 
genitor of Adam’s ancestors, that ruled the earth a mill¬ 
ion years and perished ! But what does he show us ? 
Not the human frame, or form, or features imbedded 
in the mountain rocks, as skeleton whales and extinct 
monsters of the deep have rock-bound coffins there ; 
but among the debris of old caves he has found a few 
bones which he alleges to have once belonged to man. 
These, as found, are mixed with bones of tigers, bears, 
hyenas, and other wild and ferocious animals. But the 
scientist does not tell us which was master of the house¬ 
hold, man or the tigers, or which fed on the other— 
whether man ate the tigers, or the tigers ate the man ! 
But he claims to have discovered that man ate his fel¬ 
low-man, and cracked the shin-bone longitudinally, to 
extract the marrow as a delicacy. He also finds a long- 
handled scoop or spoon by which marrow could be ex¬ 
tracted from the end of a broken bone for the same 
purpose. Refined cannibals, feeding on the marrow of 
human bones ; dwelling in caves with wild beasts, with 



36 


THE BIBLE IK HARMONY WITH NATURE. 


the debris of dead carcasses to ornament the floors—this 
is the picture the scientist presents of man’s domestic life 
in pre-historic ages. A dark, sullen monster of cruelty 
was man in this “age of stone.” The story of the 
giant who “ smelled Englishman’s blood, and would 
have some,” must have found its original in ages be¬ 
fore “ creation.” 

Nor is the intellectual condition of these fossil men 
much improved by the alleged discovery of their handi¬ 
work in the old chalk-hills of England and France. 
The flint hatchets and knives found imbedded deep 
down in the earth are alleged to have been wrought by 
these rude primitive human hands, though they evince 
less skill in their production than the beaver’s dam and 
house in streams under the shadows of primitive forests. 
At all events, the vestiges of “ the age of stone” are 
not flattering to humanity. With physical habits far 
below the brute creation, and an intellectual status far 
below the mere instincts of many species of dumb ani¬ 
mals, we are impressed with the painful conviction that 
if physical man sojourned on they ire-adamite earth, he 
existed as a mere physical being, with none of the intel¬ 
lectual powers, endowments, and faculties of genuine 
manhood, and with none of man’s moral sensibilities. 
Contrast the picture of the scientist drawn of the fossil 
man, and that of man as created and tenanted in Eden, 
and you see the special endowments given by divine wis¬ 
dom to man, as the creation and the creature of God. 
Innocent, beautiful, affectionate, and kind, a divine 
impress is conspicuous in him and his surroundings, and 
even in his fall he is no such brutal, degenerate beast 
as the fossil man of the scientist. 

But the argument of the scientist excludes from the 


THE SCIENTIST AND THE MAN OF THE BIBLE. 37 


sum and body of things the existence of the soul, of 
things divine, of spiritual life in contradistinction from 
matter, and of God as the self-willing force, giving life 
and motion and development to the universe. The re¬ 
ligious literature of the world to him is a myth and a 
fraud. The conception of all entities not concrete in 
matter are deceptions or delusions. The very world of 
thought, or science, or literature, or morals, has no 
basis in nature. Mind is but the mere attrition of mat¬ 
ter in motion ; the motion ceasing, the mind subsists 
and acts no more—becomes in fact extinct. 

But if we so eliminate from man his mental and 
moral faculties, and his spiritual relations, the light of 
human history goes out in darkness. The wild animals 
of the frozen zone become as companions in his strata 
of life. But nay ; we go back in the simplicity of 
sacred history, and the spiritual and the divine as asso¬ 
ciated in the origin and nature of man illumine all his 
history. He is not only a different man, but gives a 
different complexion to a vast world than it would have 
borne had man only possessed the mere animal nature 
to which he is sought to be restricted. Man’s glorious 
history through six thousand years—his great enter¬ 
prises, his moral virtues, and the immense results of 
his intellectual powers—could never be hoped for from 
the mere animal man ; could never be predicated on a 
mere brutal nature. Divine relation, in its history of 
man, has its status, reality, and office, as surely indi¬ 
cated by what is known of man and his relations as the 
phenomena of the stars and the laws of attraction indi¬ 
cate the point in the sky where the hidden planet is to 
be sought and found. 

But without further digression on general principles, 


38 


THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 


assuming the fact sufficiently proved of man’s divine 
origin, and that there has from the first subsisted an 
intelligent intercommunion between man and his Maker, 
we come to note a body of facts of the highest interest. 
This communion was had in Eden with our first parents 
by the personal manifestation of the divine presence. 
God talked with them familiarly as a man talketh with 
his friend, and expressed prophecies to be realized in 
future ages. And so there was an <c open vision.” 
Abel was justified, and Cain was judged and reproved. 
Enoch was lifted on a cloud to celestial skies, and Noah 
rehearsed divine messages to the old world. Job, a 
nomadic chief, and a priest forever, without the insignia 
of sacerdotal robes, declared the eternal presence and 
power of Providence, and after great sufferings was 
crowned with divine glory in his latter days. Abraham 
believed God, and Jacob found his dream-land as a real 
experience in life as he wrestled with the angel. Moses 
saw God in the burning bush in Egypt, and talked with 
him face to face in Mount Sinai. With Joshua God 
held open communion for a lifetime. Thereafter, in 
the dark period of the Judges, there was no open vision. 
Now and then came an inspiration to leading men, nerv¬ 
ing them to heroic deeds ; then succeeded darkness and 
the shadows of death to the Hebrew nation. Prophets 
in their peculiar office then arose to communicate God’s 
will and teachings to degenerate and degraded men. 
They were not merely the foretellers of future events, 
but those who declared the divine will at the then pres¬ 
ent hour. They were teachers with divine authority, 
and bore in their persons not only a divine sanction but 
divine power. Samuel was the first who exercised this 
peculiar office ; and in virtue of its authority he anoint- 


THE SCIENTIST AND THE MAN OF THE BIBLE. 39 


ed kings, reproved rulers, judged the land, and gave a 
forecast of the fortunes of the kingdom. And all this 
while he rarely exercised executive authority. 

It is remarkable that the propliets were rarely of the 
constituted priesthood of the ancient church. In de¬ 
generate and troublous times they came up as strange * 
lights from wild and desert borders, to rebuke corrup¬ 
tion and to defy its power in high places, while pro¬ 
nouncing divine judgments on wicked men. In the 
night of moral death they came without herald or warn¬ 
ing to set a battle in array with opposing forces. As 
the lightning’s flash and rolling thunder come and go 
in the night-clad sky, as the battle of mysterious forces 
in nature, so prophets, though born and bred with men, 
seemed to have come down from the clouds with a mis¬ 
sion of truth and of fire, to convert and control nations. 
What is singular, these prophets, with intuition of the 
divine mind, came at times and under circumstances 
that made their office a necessity in the development of 
providence and grace. Read the lofty visions of Isaiah, 
the melancholy lamentations of Jeremiah, the strange 
visions of Ezekiel and the minor prophets, intimating 
intercommunion between man and the divine, and say 
whence has come this light of olden ages. 

When did matter in its phenomena so impose on the 
“ material ” mind of man as to impress on his con¬ 
sciousness of life such false coloring and false concep¬ 
tions of things unseen, and so adverse to nature ? The 
scientist will find it as difficult to explain these phe¬ 
nomena of thought as to explain how the mind exists 
or thinks at all. The consciousness of personal identity, 
of mental and moral faculties that make up manhood, 
are the evidences of nature to the great facts constitut- 


40 


THE BIBLE IK HARMONY WITH NATURE. 


ing his being—facts that can neither be controverted 
nor proved by any collateral reasoning or speculation. 
And to this consciousness the relations of man to the 
divine are in accord and harmony. The realities of the 
spiritual world and of spiritual life to man, of heaven 
and its appointments, of the divine government and 
the future judgment, are shown to he in harmony with 
the human conscience—with moral necessity in the 
nature of things, and consistent with the conceptions 
of a pure reason. 

Let the scientist show, by some evidence other than by 
his own gross material conceptions, that matter is the 
basis of all positive forces in nature. This he cannot 
do. But assuming this proposition, so against human 
consciousness and reason, he constructs a system which, 
with the veriest dogmatism, he seeks to impose on man¬ 
kind, to the destruction of their brightest and most 
glorious hopes and views of life and destiny. 

“ Just like an idiot, gazing on the brook, 

They downward pore for that which shines above ; 

They leap at stars and fasten in the mud ; 

At glory grasp, and sink in infamy.” 


TOPICS FOR CONSIDERATION ADDRESSED 
TO TEACHERS—THE LATEST PHASE OF 
INFIDELITY—THE DEGRADATION OF SCI¬ 
ENTISTS — CREATION AND THE MOSAIC 
HISTORY. 

The fact that a church and Sabbath-school are here 
shows that you appreciate the office of religion in sav¬ 
ing souls from sin and fitting the character of these 




TOPICS FOR CONSIDERATION. 


41 


children and youth for God’s service on earth, and for 
the hopes of the just when life with them shall pass 
away. You show your conviction of the great fact of 
the soul’s responsibility in relation to God, to itself, and 
to the world. You show that in religion, you who are 
parents recognize a conservative power for the protec¬ 
tion and salvation of your children. But those who 
have preceded me have rehearsed again and again the in¬ 
ducements to a religious faith and a religious life. They 
have brought in relief the consciousness of the veriest 
child of possessing the elements of immortality; have 
shown that the. dear child, laid away in the grave by 
the tender hand of the sorrowing but hopeful mother, 
is not thought to be dead for evermore. Her smallest 
little friend feels that what can think and feel and sing 
and love as the dear one gone used to do, cannot die, 
but live, still on, with Jesus. On this conviction I 
make a point to-day : the scenes of heathen missionary 
lands pass by, and holy places of the Holy Land, and 
the toils and griefs of Christ’s disciples in their own 
missionary days. But I fix on this topic of the char¬ 
acter, duty, and destiny of the soul, as the true found¬ 
ation of missionary work in Sabbath-schools, and in 
domestic and foreign lands ; because there is a body of 
men among us who set themselves up as the intellectual 
aristocracy of the country, who, with the dogmatism 
usually characterizing new sects, denounce all as igno¬ 
rant pretenders who do not receive their conclusions as 
authority. 

I recently perused a number of Professor Youmans’s 
Popular Science Monthly , and found in it corre¬ 
spondence from various parts of the world, which, 
though speaking largely of man and his history, makes 


42 


THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 


no allusion to man in his relation to God and religion. 
These men affect to believe that all truth in nature and 
science is to be sought in the dreams of an idle mysti¬ 
cism, in which only they can comprehend the dogmas 
they teach. They ever reason downward, from mind and 
thought to their assumed origin in abstract or concrete 
physical phenomena. Matter, with them, is all, and 
mind is but the attrition of matter in motion, or the : 
simple result of material development. These scientists | 
deny all that the Bible teaches with respect to the ori¬ 
gin of man and the creation, believing in the absurdity 
that the less can produce the greater, independent of 
any extrinsic aid or agency. They hold that man is 
but an incident in the development of animated na¬ 
ture, and find no place for his spiritual and moral fac¬ 
ulties—constantly reasoning of the instincts of animals 
as superior to the human intellect. The sacred animals 
that are made objects of worship in pagan countries 
would have a long- lease of their divinity if our scien¬ 
tists were to control the opinions of their age. 

The attacks of these “ scientists 99 on the Mosaic his¬ 
tory of creation is significant only for its obvious pur¬ 
pose to break down the authority of that revelation in 
which the spiritual duty and the hopes of man are set : 
forth and sustained. But in completing our remarks, i 
let us inquire if that history is not in accordance with j 
all the discovered facts and phenomena in nature ? It j 
says : 

“ In the beginning God created the heavens and the j 
earth. And the earth was without form and void, and 
darkness was upon the face of the deep ; and the spirit | 
of God moved upon the face of the waters. 7 ’ 

There was neither sunlight nor starlight to vary the 




TOPICS FOR CONSIDERATION. 


43 


gloom that rested upon this embryo earth. Days and 
years and centuries were all uncounted in this prelimi¬ 
nary agglomeration of materials of the forming world. 
This pre-adamite creation is entirely consistent with 
the sacred record. The waters or fluids above the fir¬ 
mament, and the waters below—that is, the air, or its 
elemental gases—were still commingled in one grand 
mass. Whether the interior of the earth were solid 
metal or liquid fire, its surface made progress toward 
the condition designed by Providence for supporting 
animal and vegetable life. There might have been a 
flood, with no bow in the clouds—a flood covering the 
entire earth for a long, unmeasured time. And this 
great deep, by the order of Providence, was filled with 
shells and distinctive orders of animal life. Huge le¬ 
viathans rolled their enormous bulks through the dark 
and muddy seas ; and when, in some convulsions long 
prior to the deluge, the mud and earth were heaved up¬ 
ward from the ocean’s depth, the shellfishes and moving 
mammoth forms of life beneath the murky flood were 
caught in the debris of the upheaved ocean-bed, and 
became concrete in the rock formations of the period. 
As fossils of a dead generation of animal life, they have 
been restored in the form of huge stone skeletons, and 
now are shown in the natural history museums of 
Europe and America. This generation of extinct ani¬ 
mal species was the lowest type found in nature. No 
fossil bones of human beings have been found in these 
rock-bound coffins. Nor at a later era, when bird-tracks 
were impressed on soft sandstones cast above the tide, 
did man figure at all among the fossils of a dead past. 
But at length the air and water found their distinctive 
spheres, and light came down to mark the changes in 


44 THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 

the developed world, and the evening and the morning 
were the first day. 

For the rest of creation, it proceeded in the natural 
order of things, until God ended his work on the sev¬ 
enth day. Vegetable life on the virgin soil became at 
once abundant, and beasts and birds found a luxury of 
provision for their support when they were produced in 
life. Man was only created when the earth was fitted 
for his condition and welfare. In the image of God 
man walked from the hand of his Creator, clothed with 
grace and glory. Man was the handiwork of the intel¬ 
ligent Jehovah, and not the maturity of some old, ig¬ 
noble beast, or inferior animal existence. Man, save 
his fall by sin, was the same being as now. Show us 
Adam’s grave, and there will be a skeleton with organs 
just like those that now pertain to manhood. 

How much more satisfactory to reason is the Scrip¬ 
ture account of the origin of things, resulting from the 
will of an adequate almighty power, than the specula¬ 
tions of your modern philosophers ! The duty of teach¬ 
ing Bible truth is the great lesson I would enforce in 
these remarks. Intending this a^Iress for teachers 
chiefly, I urge you to respect this duty. Then the great 
missionary work will go forward. 


INFIDELITY NOT A NATURAL OR LEGITI¬ 
MATE STATE OF THE HUMAN MIND. 

To a pure reason (not, perhaps, in the sense of the 
phrase as used by the German philosophers, but in an 
evangelical sense) we would not need to add the word 
“ legitimate ” to the “ natural state” of the human 



INFIDELITY AND THE HUMAN MIND. 


45 


mind, in the language of our proposition, to avoid a 
misapprehension. We mean to say that to an unpreju¬ 
diced mind there is satisfactory evidence of one and of 
all the great and solemn truths connected with life and 
hope, which infidelity affects to reject and despise. 
There is satisfactory evidence of the existence of God, 
of his moral government, of the sinfulness of man, and 
the office and necessity of a Saviour. Nay, more : there 
is evidence of spiritual life, independent of material sub¬ 
stance, not only as pertaining to God, but to men. 

It is at this last point, then, we begin, where our lives 
begin ; or rather where memory begins to store up the 
treasures of the past. Tor memory, to an infidel who 
believes man but a production and growth of mere 
physical nature, must be a strange faculty. An infidel 
who affects to believe nothing that is not in some way 
cognizable by the physical senses should be able to 
show us the fibre or tissue or tablet on which memory 
has written the detail of life’s progress. From the ca¬ 
pacity and faculty of memory alone reason perceives 
an identity of pure intellectual life. But if the exer¬ 
cise of one faculty alone prove this great fact, shall we 
disbelieve it, when the evidences are gathered so thick 
about us as to leave no room for contradiction or a 
counter intimation in the whole prospective before us ? 
Not only memory, but thought, reflection, contempla¬ 
tion, and, more than all, the very consciousness of the 
mind, prove it something more than matter, or a gener¬ 
ation of material accidents. 

But I should not, perhaps, dwell here on a truth 
which every man must feel who recognizes the identity 
of his own existence. No man is by nature, by grace, 
or scarcely by his own depravity, an infidel here. In 


46 THE BIBLE IN' HARMONY WITH NATURE. 

this point, indeed, is the strong meat of infidel theol¬ 
ogy. That is, ifc is disbelieved as a matter of necessity, 
to carry out the consistency of other conceits and dog¬ 
mas into which he has fallen. And it is not till the 
mind takes its affection away from pure reason, and 
descends to the valley of selfishness, and indulges in all 
sorts of corrupt humors and passions, that it is blinded 
as to the nature and character of its own being. It is not 
till the mind comes to such a state that it seeks, pro¬ 
fessedly in vain among grovelling physical existences, 
analogies to prove an intellectual truth, far higher in 
position than the most exalted physical object in na¬ 
ture—a truth whose proof is in itself a conclusion, as 
we may say, from the reflection of the mind’s own pure 
reason. We might as well labor through the quagmires 
of the forest swamps of this world to learn the real feat¬ 
ures of the fixed stars, as to appeal to gross physical 
reasonings for the law's and hopes and features of our 
intellectual being. 

The truth of independent spiritual life wants no 
proof besides itself. It is an axiom so plain and evi¬ 
dent that nothing under the light of heaven could 
make it plainer. We might as well attempt to prove 
that the sun shines on a clear noonday, by illustrations 
drawn from the obscured and drowned moon, as to at¬ 
tempt to show by gross physical speculations that the 
mind in its intellectual fires and moral sensibilities, in 
? its worlds of thought and universe of imaginings, is not 
a libel on its own consciousness. 

We might say that this axiom rests on the evidence of 
the senses, if the very term “ the senses 99 had not been 
degraded by its use in the popular philosophy of the last 
two centuries. For there is no truth of which the mind 




INFIDELITY AND THE HUMAN MIND. 


47 


has an earlier consciousness than the distinction between 
itself and all things else ; even between itself and the 
body in which it resides. In the earliest childhood, 
when the shadows of memory are transient and fading, 
this one deep consciousness is a settled element, as it 
were, of the soul. It is the first thing that was ever 
remembered, and when its first image had form and 
compass in the mind, it bore no impress of a sudden 
discovery, but of a long, familiar existence, and appear¬ 
ed as an inherent element of life in a distinguishing 
sense, the generation of humanity. 

But I dwell on the point of the personal consciousness 
of man as to the spiritual and intellectual character of 
his being merely to relieve the minds of any that may 
have conceived difficulties in apprehending the exist¬ 
ence of other spiritual beings. For if man, as he cer¬ 
tainly does, gives evidence of such an existence, we have 
fair grounds of inference that he is not the highest in¬ 
telligence in the universe. 

But the pantheists, who talk of the laws of nature 
and God only in connection with matter, find nothing 
in all their schemes, aside from man, that will come up 
to the position and character of a reasoning intelligence. 
In the great distinction of existences, between that 
which Icnoivs and that which does not hnow, the pan¬ 
theist’s God is the inert, mindless slave, and man, in¬ 
deed, is sought to be enthroned ; but where ? Among 
the swine and brutes that wallow, as we may say, at the 
bottom of creation ! If intellect were a mere excretion 
or principle of matter, why is it not strictly subject to 
natural laws ? If the laws of gravity, of mechanics, 
and of other of nature’s incidents and phenomena, are 
God, why is he enchained in the treadmill of necessity, 


48 THE BIBLE IH HARMOHY WITH HATURE. 

while man exercises the liberty of choice and will in 
what he does ? We read of men who exalt and serve 
the creature more than the Creator. Are not these the 
devotees of infidelity ? 

Not only in the analysis of the individual mind do we 
find the falsehood of grovelling infidelity—do we find 
man’s dignity asserted, and in that dignity the glory of 
his Creator—but the great weight of public sentiment 
in Christian and heathen lands is against the dogmas 
of infidel speculation. With savage and civilized men, 
the notion of man’s spirituality, and hence immortal¬ 
ity, is held in some form or other, as also the doctrines 
of a special providence. 

We do not say that the intellectual belief of these 
great doctrines make men who hold them virtuous and 
holy as they ought to be ; but in reference to our prop¬ 
ositions they show that infidelity is not a natural state 
of the human mind. In our common law, the code of 
the Druids has probably in some parts come down to 
us ; and it is held that what has been approved by the 
common judgment of mankind for one or two thou¬ 
sand years is a correct development of the laws of mind. 
We need not refer to religious principles here, however. 
Yet who can tell us when the custom began, if not in 
Adam, of believing in a special providence, and of offer¬ 
ing sacrifices to propitiate the favor of the gods ? 

If man in his physical existence were made the anal¬ 
ogy of Deity, instead of confining Cod’s being to stolid 
matter of rocks and trees, and earths and planets in the 
heavens, we might expect to see the animal in moun¬ 
tains, and Cod, a thinking, moral being, the spitfire 
giant of the volcanoes ! Such a notion has prevailed 
in ancient times ; while still the Persian Magi see a 


INFIDELITY AND THE HUMAN MIND. 


49 


deity in fire, and centred in the sun a power omnipo¬ 
tent. 

We have said that mind is not to he investigated or illus¬ 
trated by aught below itself. It is, in fact, the star of this 
lower world ; but a star how fallen ! It knows itself to 
be, and still it is a mystery, in itself, and in its relations 
to the spirit world. But the believer in God, in Christ, 
and religion, looks far beyond the cloud that shrouds 
the soul. God’s spirit witnesseth with ours the light 
that is within us, and glorious hopes of a coming life. 
This makes up the confidence of faith. 

Spiritual life in man proves that God, to fill the com¬ 
pass of the universe, must be a spirit too—a spirit in¬ 
finite, pervading space, controlling mind and matter, 
nature’s laws—a moral essence more than physical, and 
governing hence by moral laws all moral, intellectual 
beings. The pantheist would have a material God, as 
large at least as all the universe. But if intellect exist, 
then God is infinite in intellectual power ; if spirit, 
then he is a spirit over all. 

I know that many who confess their debt to Deity 
pay him in mockery and a wicked life. But here their 
judgment and confessions are against themselves, and 
therefore must have weight of truth. Even Shakes¬ 
peare found the fear of God in the low lanes of Lon¬ 
don, and when a hero of his play thought of death, he 
felt the dread of judgment. His Hamlet reasoned thus 
of what life is, or what might he eternity : “To be or 
not to be, that is the question !” And this was the con¬ 
clusion : “ Who would fardels bear to sweat and groan 
under a weary life ? but that the dread of something 
after death, that undiscovered country from whose 
bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will, and makes 


50 THE BIBLE IH HARMOHY WITH HATURE. 

us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that 
we know not of.” 

Without a purpose of becoming enlightened and in¬ 
telligent Christians, even wicked men are often con¬ 
strained to acknowledge the truth and the force of 
moral obligations. And when the human intellect is 
debased, degraded, and prostituted, it often illustrates 
the high purpose for which it was created. Who that 
has appreciated in a high-wrought tragedy its compass 
of intellectual interest, has not felt the great purpose of 
man’s creation ? Would he believe that physical con¬ 
tingencies were sufficient to account for what had 
touched his soul ? He might say that the author or the 
character was a lost jewel glistening still in the pit of 
moral degradation. But as to what he should be, or 
what he might be, he could not and would not be mis¬ 
taken. All the inimitable arts of poetry, nature, heart, 
and sentiment are the concomitants of intellectual life. 
Nature may have sweet tones, but these fall cold and 
dead when intellect perverted doubts a spirit life, and 
scorns the thought that God has made the soul for har¬ 
mony and love. 

But why dwell on this subject ? Those who are dead 
to Heaven’s teachings have blunted conscience to its 
own moral witness. And if one arise from death, they 
would not hear ; a prophet’s voice would be despised ; an 
angel’s song would be esteemed delusion, sent to cheat 
the cold skeleton’s remorseless heart of unbelief into 
an hour of pleasure. All life’s cherished hopes are 
counted evanescent phantoms of a sickly heart; eter¬ 
nity is a dream to hide despair, to which, alas ! the soul 
must wake midst death’s deep pangs and troubles ! 
Yes, if infidelity be truth, then nature makes us all the 


INFIDELITY AND THE HUMAN MIND. 


51 


victims of delusion, and this vaunted God, called nature, 
is hut a deceiving hypocrite. For what nation of the 
human family, from the equator to the pole, does not 
conceive some notion of life beyond the grave ? What 
mother ever yet gave up her child to death without a 
hope of meeting its spirit, kindred to her own, in a better 
land ? The rude Indian in our Western wilds expects a 
heaven of darker forests, and game more plenty than he 
here enjoys. And why? who has taught him? The 
interior life asserts its power, even in these rudest speci¬ 
mens of the human form. The very inborn instincts of 
his being teach him life’s dignity, in prospect of a com¬ 
ing world, that man was not made in vain, nor yet alone 
for the pains and sorrows of this short state of being. 

For one to be convinced that the soul is not a dis¬ 
tinctive existence from matter, he must be able to ac¬ 
count for its origin as a phenomenon of matter. To 
determine this, he must first conclude whether the 
characteristics of mind are inferior, equal, or superior 
to matter. That they are superior to matter, not even 
infidels, as I have learned, have pretended to deny. At 
any rate, they regard the mind as the highest result of 
material refinement. Dr. Darwin has reasoned that oys¬ 
ters and other testaceous animals were at one time the 
only animal life found on the earth. This proposition 
might have been true in the progress of creation; but 
another proposition which he coupled with this is a 
most gross absurdity : that man derived his origin from 
this beginning of life, after successive refining genera¬ 
tions of animal progress, improvement, or perfection. 
The heathen mythologists were less absurd in their tra¬ 
ditions than this celebrated champion of infidelity. 
For they only expected such miracles as this through 


52 


THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 


the intervention of the gods. This tendency of mate¬ 
rial things on this earth is to decay rather than refine¬ 
ment. It is a mathematical axiom that a less, unassist¬ 
ed by extraneous aid, cannot produce a greater. The no¬ 
tion of Darwin is as absurd as the pretensions of the 
alchemists. The former would see a mind or soul as a 
mere fungus of matter ; the latter expected the baser 
would produce the more refined metal—that lead could 
be turned into gold. 

If the mind has such a progress, or man rather, some¬ 
thing of its incidents should be marked in the annals of 
3000 years. Even the fixed stars have indicated what 
must be a vast progress of motion during this time, 
making a difference of two or three degrees in their ob¬ 
served position in the heavens, at the immense distance 
they are placed from us. If this progress in the fixed 
stars could thus be noted or accurately inferred, re¬ 
mote as they are situated from us, could not those re¬ 
mote ages have left some marks of the position of man, 
not in the scale of education or intellectual improve¬ 
ment, but in his rank, as marking change of species 
from the more gross to the more refined of animal ex¬ 
istence? But, nay, there is no one faculty that per¬ 
tains to the mind that did not write its faithful record 
on the pages of history more than three thousand years 
ago. Abraham and the earlier patriarchs had their 
kindred, their family interests, and their estates. The 
same passions, interests, and prejudices that are now 
found among men were cherished by these remote peo¬ 
ple. In fact, the domestic manners of the patriarchs 
are still seen among the nomadic tribes in the moun¬ 
tains of Arabia and Persia. The combination of fami¬ 
lies, dependants, and kindred, for mutual safety against 




INFIDELITY AND THE HUMAN MIND. 


53 


robbers and the wars of petty kingdoms, still make up 
these tribes. The same domestic utensils are found in 
their tents, and the same habits and customs are recog¬ 
nized as those characterizing these people in the most 
ancient times. 

Then, as now, the soul wrought up its deep senti¬ 
ments and its intellectual force in the tones of music, 
and wild melody responded its sweet echoes to the dwell¬ 
ers in mountains and glens, to testify the capacity of 
the soul to relish the joys of Heaven’s eternal songs. 

It scarcely needs faith to believe in the peculiar pow¬ 
ers and faculties of mind, whose mighty labors are 
everywhere visible around us. The ruins of antiquity 
sufficiently show what mind has been ; the present 
shows what it is ; and the spirit of new enterprise start¬ 
ing into life gives us some impression of what it will 
continue to be. But it must require a great deal of cre¬ 
dulity to believe, without a particle of evidence, the no¬ 
tion of Darwin and many modern infidels, that man is 
a mere physical incident in the growing up in the field 
of nature, of mighty cities, of giant ships ; or seminaries 
where a higher order of leasts are indoctrinated into 
the “ delusion ” of the soul’s immortality. 

Again, in human labors the fitness of its productions 
for the purposes for which they were designed are taken 
as evidence of wisdom in their contriver. This quality 
of wisdom is one of which the mind has a distinct con¬ 
ception. Cause and effect could not be estimated with¬ 
out it. And it requires no violent faith to perceive 
that it must be an attribute of Deity, the perfection and 
nice adaptation of whose works are so infinitely superior 
to those of man. Science has wondered, at every step 
of its progress, at the nice adaptation of all the princi- 


54 THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 

pies and elements of nature to the precise ends re¬ 
quired, to sustain the earth in being, or to make its 
continuance a blessing to its inhabitants, or to save the 
universe from tumbling together in one indistinguish¬ 
able wreck or chaos. These proofs of divine wisdom 
have occupied the lives of many eminent sages and phi¬ 
losophers in their contemplation. The great Isaac 
Newton, at the close of his life, could scarcely find ex¬ 
pression for his admiration and reverence of the wisdom 
and majesty of God. He might have exclaimed, in¬ 
deed, with the Psalmist : “ When I consider the heav¬ 
ens, the works of thy fingers, the moon and stars which 
thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful 
of him, or the son of man, that thou visitest him ?” 

I doubt not, from the considerations adduced, that 
such of my readers as can appreciate the force of moral 
evidence, are prepared to assent to the proposition we 
have attempted to prove. To those who regard man as 
an animal merely, without a rational or conscious soul, 
who must, as the apostle tells us, reason as natural 
brute beasts, I could scarcely hope to make this subject 
even intelligible, much less to convince them of truth 
that will bring along with it the force of moral obliga¬ 
tion, requiring obedience to the divine laws. I have 
ever considered public and private debates worse than 
useless when both parties would not assent to the same 
rationale of truth. 

Now, when infidels assume such dogmas as this, that 
there are but four things in nature that we know any¬ 
thing about, such as matter and motion, time and 
space, and nothing should be believed unless it can be 
demonstrated, I deem it useless to argue such conceits ; 
for there are three things immediately in my mind 





INFIDELITY AND THE HUMAN MIND. 


55 


that no person has yet determined, whether they are 
included in either of the four classes above—I refer to 
light, heat, and electricity. If we ask for a demonstra¬ 
tion of what these are, the infidel cannot reply that we 
have reason to believe they are material, without dem¬ 
onstration, for he believes there is no reason in belief. 
For while they have exhibited none of the known prop¬ 
erties of matter, and demonstration cannot be had, he 
has no business to hazard a presumption. Yet the ef¬ 
fects of all these agencies are most extensive, powerful, 
and efficient; and their distinctive influences are as 
well known as if they were tangible and fully known in 
their essential elements. We use them, we talk of them, 
we understand them to a great extent, while they 
scarcely admit of any sort of analysis or demon¬ 
stration. 

I have no physical demonstrations on these great 
moral subjects to satisfy confirmed infidels, although I 
hope my remarks may be profitable to those who can 
appreciate the force of moral evidence, on which the 
truth of even profane history rests. 

I will briefly recapitulate the points to which we have 
arrived : 

The proof of our proposition has been particular as 
well as general. This proof is cumulative. The more 
the mind pursues honest inquiry, the more does it find 
itself in its constitution and capacities fitted to believe 
the great truths of religion, and this one great truth in 
particular—the soul’s capacity to hold communion with s 
a spiritual deity. And the more nature is studied, the 
more are we struck with the wisdom, majesty, and 
glory of the Divine Creator. If man can commune 
with God, he may receive a revelation of his will, and 


56 THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 

of mysteries which, the voice and light of nature do not 
so fully elucidate. 

It is but a handful of people that have essayed to deny 
the existence and government of God, out of thousands 
of millions who are scattered over the face of the earth 
that acknowledge the great elements of these truths. 
Whether these men have imbibed exalted views of their 
own wisdom, or have conceived contempt for the judg¬ 
ment of all the rest of mankind, is of but little conse¬ 
quence, so long as they reject truths as plainly and fully 
certified as is the sunlight at noonday—truths which 
exist, and are supported by conclusive moral evidence, 
whether infidels may believe them or not. It is a re¬ 
markable fact that infidels and modern materialists have 
seemed to keep up a sort of dying existence, that prom¬ 
ises no well-settled and widely-extended influence. In¬ 
deed, the very history of infidelity has convinced me 
that Providence careth for and will defend his own 
against wicked men and devils. The champions of 
open and avowed atheism are few, though some of. them 
have claimed to be even the intellectual giants of their 
day. But ere their brief life had terminated, they were 
deserted by their followers, and the old rickety, discord¬ 
ant cant of infidel hate could scarcely raise a sufficient 
clamor to hide the pangs of despair in their dying hour 
from an observing world. As I have intimated, these 
infidels have asked us too much—to believe that nine 
hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand of the hu¬ 
man family are wrong in their convictions, though they 
have just as good means as the infidel has for knowing 
the truth, and that the infidel, maugre his pride and 
self-conceit, must of necessity be correct. To believe 
with the infidel, I must believe that he is the one wise 


ETERNITY. 


57 


man out of a thousand fools, and this with the evidence 
to the contrary, as it were, before my eyes. It would 
take faith without evidence for me to believe with the 
infidels, while Christianity affords sufficient evidence, I 
had almost said, to authorize belief without faith. At 
any rate, the evidences are such as to settle the intellect¬ 
ual belief of thousands, whose love of sin constrains 
them to stifle conscience and to banish anything like a 
practical faith from their hearts. 


ETERNITY. 

Thus spake a finite angel, born and living in the past 
infinity of eternity : 

“ A wandering spirit in dark, unfathomed depths, I 
saw not, tasted not, felt not, until a consciousness of 
thought and being stole on me as a waking life, devel¬ 
oped as from oblivion of the past unknown. I was a 
fact, an entity defined ; in universal chaos of emptiness, 
of heights unseen, of depths unknown, a floating waif 
within a dark obscure—no way-points measured dis¬ 
tance in the sky, as stars and suns that shine so brilliant 
now. There was succession, order, antecedents, and 
events and consequences ; but these were so unmarked 
by things extrinsic where no thing existed, I moved a 
floating spirit in ethereal realms. Time was not, but 
eternity had been, was, and was to be. Duration—yes, 
but all unmeasured by the scale of years. A conscious 
progress left no trace in air. Eternity was the name of 
time unborn, unmeasured, passing onward, yet never 
gone.” 



58 THE BIBLE IH HA EM OH Y WITH HATUEE. 


Such was nature when the past developed from the 
obscure, and darkness was the universe. 

To aid our conceptions of the changes called creation, 
I add the poetic views on the origin of light, and The 
Oratorio of Creation . 

LET THERE BE LIGHT. 

Ohce darkness reigned the monarch of the deep. 

Her realm the place the universe now holds : 
Oblivion’s void, where God appeared to sleep, 

Wrapped, from conception, in deep mystery’s folds. 

Then darkness was the subject and the crown ; 

The universe in her unfathomed zone 
Slept, was unconceived ; her moody frown 

Was, but else was not; ere embryo forms were known. 

^ ^ 

But hark ! that thunder ! Sound, how strange thou art! 

Comes pealing from the awful depths of night. 

In tones distinctive bidding night depart; 

’Tis God’s command, “ Light be!” and there was light. 

God looked the vision from his cloud-wrapped throne, 
And livid flames athwart the sombre gloom 
As lightning spread, and, widening, fearful shone 
Through heaven, and what has proved the fallen spir¬ 
its’ tomb. 

Thus darkness fell, but yet again to rise ; 

Eor if o’er sense has her dominion ceased. 

She yet is black, a veil to moral eyes, 

To hide from spiritual view the path of peace. 



THE ORATORIO OF CREATION. 


59 


Speak yet again, thou dread Omnipotence, 

“ Let there be light V’ that man, deluded, vain, 

May grope no more, the slave of sin and sense, 

His downward path to sorrow, guilt, and shame. 

Ah, thou hast spoken ! light was in the earth. 

And we, poor blinded mortals, knew it not; 

We saw the star that glorified the birth 
Of Jesus, Light of life, and then his words forgot. 

Forgive our blindness, blest Immanuel, 

And let thy light forever in our breast 

Become the guide to lead us safe and well 
From sin’s dark ways unto thy heavenly rest. 


THE ORATORIO OF CREATION. 

“ When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God 
shouted for joy.”—J ob 38 : 7. 

This was the Oratorio of Creation, not the production 
of artists , but the original, heaven-attuned voices of 
angel harmonies, the breathings of angelic natures 
commanding the joyful sympathies of heaven, earth, 
and God. The morning stars were new-created angels 
appointed to minister to this beautiful world as it came 
from the Creator. 

But if man had not seen this grand jubilee of the ce¬ 
lestials, nor heard these sacred harmonies in the days of 
Job, much less do we hear them now, when the spiritual 
and the true have become so lost through sin, and our 
minds are absorbed in things sordid, vain, and selfish. 

But though we may catch but the faintest whispers of 



60 THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 

this music of the celestial spheres, it is well to stop and 
listen, if hut the echoes of these divine tones should 
whisper the Spirit’s teachings to our anxious hearts. 

On such an orchestra we hope to wait, to such we 
hope to listen, when hope is lost in never-ending joy. 
But for this grand original concert of nature, who can 
grasp the infinite in harmony and song, in intellectual 
life and moral sympathies ? And yet transfixed we lis¬ 
ten to the tones that sung the birthday of the pristine 
world. 

With Adam and our mother Eve we walk again 
Abroad on Eden’s hills or flowery vales. 

With joyful thought enamored with the scenes. 

Its evergreens and glowing beauties of 

The new-made world. In Eden ? Yes, we are ; 

But can we talk with God as Adam talked, or sing 
With mother Eve a morning song, or raise 
Our voices with the morning stars, to sing 
Creation’s song in harmonies divine ? 

Nay ; we can but listen, then, to angel chants. 

We see indeed, in beatific trance, a cloud, 

Nay, brilliant curtained sky, the light of morn 
Spanning the firmament with glowing fire, 

A canopy divine let down from heaven to earth, 

O’er Eden’s flowery hills and forest bowers ; 

And then and there God’s sons, the morning stars. 
That man until the days of ancient Job 
Had neither seen nor heard, came out and sang 
The praises of the infinite Jehovah, 

The glories of his handiwork, the past, 

The present, and the future of His reign, 


THE ORATORIO OE CREATION. 


61 


The new creation, its glories and its life. 

Ah, yes ! we seem to listen now as comes 
A spirit form and sings the Ancient of Days, 

And the floating air seems living harmonies. 

“ Ere time was born, eternal years unknown. 
Eternity, that knew no day nor night. 

Passed on unchallenged by the knells of change. 
Then nature’s realm, a boundless, formless void, 
A depth unfathomed by the flight of thought, 

Was nothingness of being ; desolate, 

A depth unmeasured and a height unseen. 

No shining sun, or earth, or stars were known, 

No atom dust or monad floated there ; 

Still God was Deity Omnipotent ; 

Despite the pantheist’s theories of time. 

His own eternal forces, then as now 
The universe, not the soul of matter ; 

But God, who needed not material 
Entities to quicken powers that were 
Before, the life and force of nature yet 
Unborn. God slept, nor waked as from the night 
Of all the past. But God was light and life. 

And purity immaculate. Abstract 
Of matter, God within Himself was all, 

In all—a life that lived, indeed, 

That acted ever its own volitions ; 

Infinite in every attribute. 

Consistent with His character as God. 

God then lived, not an abstract, recondite. 
Invisible nothingness—Jehovah 
Crowned—a social Being whose Son was born 
Of an eternal generation before 


62 THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 

All worlds, begotten of the Father, God; 

The Son, the brightness of His Father’s glory. 

Who smiled in social life before the past 
Was born, and with the Holy Ghost lived on 
The Trinity in unity of power, 

The one living and true God, that was, is. 

And shall be evermore—the Almighty. 

So God the Spirit too approved the joy 
Of social life, an element of bliss, 

Celestial joy, reserved for saints in rest. 

Creation’s work, though glorious in itself. 

Added no glory to the Lord of life 
Beyond what crowned the Ancient of Days. 

The diadem, whose brilliants ever shine 
With lights celestial, while the flying years 
Were all unknown, and ages neither came nor went 
When matter was an unknown fact or thought. 

But man knoweth not the secrets of the Lord, 

And how then know the counsels of his throne ? 
And who go groping back a million years 
To find out mysteries of the mighty past ? 

But nay, God is and lives, a boundless power, 
Though unto finite sense a power unseen, 

Sitting on his throne invisible as night. ’ ’ 

Then ceased this song to the Ancient of Days, 
And him who sung retired amidst the clouds ; 

In deep refrain His voice in mystery died. 

* * * * * * 

Then comes the angel of creation’s morn. 

And sings the jubilee of nature born. 

“ But, lo ! comes matter dust so fine that none 
With angel eyes could see its atom forms. 


THE ORATORIO OF CREATIOH. 63 

Its monads, nearest nothing yet as things 
Of substance floating in the depths of space. 

Sprung forth from nothing by the power of God, 

Then a law of the same infinite will 
Brings atom to atom, as bone came to bone 
In the prophet’s dream. In wild confusion 
A cloud conglomerate, like comet’s train 
Without its fires, floats in the boundless deep, 

Embryo of a universe to come. 

“ The formless cloud then moves with quickened speed 
To depths untold, and then aloft more high 
Than thought can dream or soar ; anon above 
And then below, and far, far, far away, 

Through wilds of starless night, and then around. 
Circling unmeasured spheres, moving ever 
On ; till centres and laws to concentrate 
The floating chaos to round and solid worlds 
Are fixed by God as in a flash of thought. 

Thus what became the heavens and the earth 
Evolved from nothing by the power of God, 

In the beginning of visible and created things.” 

So spake the oracle, or rather sang in harmony pro¬ 
found, 

In words that angels say in speech that was 
Vernacular in heaven. But how those harmonies 
Are lost in spirit when brought down to man. 

In terms of rustic speech and rude conceits, 

Of things so vast, so glorious, and sublime ? 

The angel’s voice sang still creation’s song : 

“ Light is now a bright reality by God’s command, 


64 THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 

And sheds its brightest beams. The new-made ear 
And stormy sky, responding to the cloud 
Of floating fire, illumination vast 
That filled the compass of the vasty deep. 

“ The earth from formless chaos, a globe of 
Liquid fire, became opaque in surface. 

With crust of stone that pent the hidden fires. 
While watery vapors from the burning mass 
Had generated seas and lakes and streams. 

And made the mass of fire a real world. 

How darkness was before upon the deep, 

And God in spirit on the waters moved. 

And said, Let there be light! and there was light ; 
And evening shade and morning light 
Announced the birth of time.” 

The angel of the pristine world now sings 
The morning song in praises of Jehovah : 

“ Depart, ye seas, unto your rock-bound beds, 
And let the land be seen ; and flowers. 

And grass, and trees spring from the dust to life ; 
Yea, mists and gentle showers shall give to plants 
And vegetable life refreshing verdure. 

Then come the fishes of the sea, the birds 
That fly in air, the beasts upon the plain. 

And every living thing that walks and breathes. 
And God pronounced them good. And all 
These his handiwork made plain, his words 
The kind beneficence in their creation.” 

And then came man, a living, breathing soul, 

In God’s pure image—features, spirit, form ; 


THE ORATORIO OF CREATION. 


65 


And Eve, the queen of Eden, smiled in love 
Upon her new-found lord, the man divine ; 

And they together blessed the Lord of heaven 
And earth, Creator and Immortal King. 

Now the last chorus of creation’s song 
Is sung by man, with angels joined therein. 

In tones expressive, innocent, and pure. 

As well became the sinless, happy pair. 

In retrospect of God the Eather’s love. 

“ In Eden’s green bowers we sing of its flowers, 

In harmonies sweet and divine ; 

God’s blessings and love of man from above, 

Of earth in its beauties sublime. 

“ The Ancient of Days, we will sing of His praise, 
Of God’s omnipotent power ; 

Of glories displayed in the worlds he has made, 
Now here, in this beautiful bower. 

“ A song to the light that banishes night, 

We sing, and the beauties of morn ; 

Of time in its whiles, of day in its smiles, 

Of years from eternity born. 

“ The stars in the sky, the sun lifted high, 

The moon with her bright crescent horn, 

Shine forth to the praise of God in His ways, 

In the beauties of night and of morn. 

“ Then to the praise of the Ancient of Days, 

Let the chorus join in the song ; 

God’s sons from the sky will praise the Most High, 
Roll, roll your music along. 


66 THE BIBLE IH HARMOHY WITH HATURE. 

“ Hallelujah to the Lord, catch the soft word. 
And sing hallelujah again, 

To God of the skies, who caused to arise 
The beauties of mountain and plain. 

“ His firmament blue, cerulean hue, 

That stretches so deep and away, 

Where star-jewels shine from depths so sublime, 
From eye to the breaking of day. 

“ Praise God, whose light is the beauty of night. 
And of the brilliant golden morn ; 

At the day’s decline.who causeth to shine 
The moon as the golden horn. 

“ Let praises in song bear the chorus along, 
Repeating thanksgiving again, 

As rising to glory we finish our story, 

In notes that die in refrain.” 


FALLEN MAN ON PRIMITIVE PROBATION. 

“ So lie drove out the man.”—G en. 3 : 24. 

This was the act of God that certified the ruin of the 
fall. God had glorified his new creation : the light of 
celestial purity had been reflected from the face of a vir- - 
gin world. The morning stars had sung together, and 
the sons of God had shouted for joy. Paradise had been 
planted and bloomed, and golden fruits were hung out 
on its smiling bowers as gems set in a flowery coronet. 
Man had walked upright and talked, as in the sympho¬ 
nies of the whispering breeze, with the ineffable and the 
infinite God. 




FALLEN MAN OK PRIMITIVE PROBATION. 67 

But all these were now to man but the treasures of 
memory, the light of a glorious past, showing in more 
effectual relief the gloom of a sin-ruined earth ; showing 
still to man the holiness he had lost, and certifying the 
eternal realities of truth. 

The primitive purity of creation is a fact in sacred 
history, revealed and recorded, as certifying the holi¬ 
ness and benevolence of God. God pronounced his cre¬ 
ation good, not only as a whole when completed, but in . 
its successive developments—in the purpose that planned 
it, in its inception, progress, and completion. Not a 
good brought out of evil by a superinducing divine wis¬ 
dom, but that which had not been tainted or marred 
by the approach of sin. It was emphatically an ema¬ 
nation from the fountain of infinite goodness. 

Man was the crowning jewel of this creation. His 
soul was in the likeness of God. But he was a moral 
being, had the power of will, and that will was free. 
Without such power of choice he would have been no 
higher than dead matter in the moral universe. He 
could neither have known God, enjoyed heaven, nor en¬ 
dured hell. God, who seeth the end from the begin¬ 
ning, and doeth all his pleasure for reasons satisfactory 
to his infinite wisdom, determined to create man as 
man, not as an inferior animal; determined to create 
him as a moral being, with all the incidents and endow¬ 
ments, charging him with the responsibilities of his own 
purposes and acts. And man so endowed, so blessed, so 
distinguished, sinned, fell ; and God executed a part 
of the penalty resulting from the fall in the act set forth 
in the text. 

The old story of the fall, so familiar to the Christian 
world, is ever new, because the living history of every age 


68 THE BIBLE IK HARMONY WITH NATURE. 

is so connected with the primary origin of man’s degener¬ 
acy and its resulting experience, that it is not only an ac¬ 
complished fact of six thousand years gone by, but a liv¬ 
ing reality of the present hour. In the simple story of 
Eden and its transformation by sin, we have an apt illus¬ 
tration of the prospects of all who devote themselves to 
the pleasure of the world and forget the counsels of 
God. When man obeyed God, God did all for him : he 
made the earth fruitful, he clothed it with beauty ; he 
gave it light and life, he gave glory and joy to those for 
whose use and happiness it was created. 

But toil was begotten of sin, and fruitful gardens so 
became sterile plains ; and rocky hills and wild and 
rugged lands were interposed between man and his daily 
bread. It is not with the poetic pictures of the primi¬ 
tive Eden, nor of the desolate earth that exacted penance 
from the guilty pair, that the chief interest of our sub¬ 
ject is found. 

Man in his moral nature, in the incidents of his joy 
and woe, as connected with holiness and sin, is the 
topic which invites our attention. Not but that the 
visible creation, as it came from the hand of God, and 
was declared good, had an inspiring influence on the 
hearts and sympathies of those whom God had conse¬ 
crated as the lord and queen of his beautiful creation. 
How could it have been otherwise ? Man was created in 
the image of God ; God breathed into him the breath 
of life, and he became a living soul. lie possessed the 
spirit of a divine life, not only like the great Spirit of 
the universe in form, but in reality. Joys and sympa¬ 
thies kindred to the divine lived in the hearts of our 
progenitors in the purity of their primitive days. If 
the morning stars sang together through the inspiring 


FALLEN MAK ON PRIMITIVE PROBATION. 


69 


scenery of the primitive earth and the new-created 
starry firmament, why should not man have possessed a 
heart of joy and expressed genuine praise of his Divine 
Father P And should he not have been affected when 
his acts of conscious guilt had changed all this, and a 
sense of fear, begotten of sin, had chased his footsteps 
past the gates of Eden, and his path before him. lay 
through rugged lands to a sad, a wild, and dreary home ? 
But the ruin wrought by sin was not in the surround¬ 
ings of man in the sin-stricken, primitive earth ; for 
these were still a part of God’s beneficent creation, and 
their very dreariness illustrated by contrast the bright 
and beautiful that bloomed so far away in climes celes¬ 
tial. The ruin was in man’s heart. The conscious¬ 
ness of guilt was to him as the sting of death. Sin was 
a new element within him, poisoning all the springs of 
life. Turbulent passions certified to his chains, and 
banished his moral sympathies with that which is pure 
and good. From a ruler under God of all which God 
had created on earth, he was changed to a slave to the 
passions of his fallen nature, and to the conviction of 
guilt and the appreciation of ruin. Bliss and joy were 
memories of the past, and remorse and pain and an¬ 
guish of spirit were the experiences of the present, and 
a fearful looking for of judgment was the forecast of 
the awful future. 

Such was the fall; such the ruin it wrought; such 
was the condition to which it brought the most beauti¬ 
ful, the most glorious, the most distinguished of God’s 
creatures on earth. Man indeed still lived, but he lived 
a dying life. A dark valley was before him, and an 
open grave waited its farther termination for the appro¬ 
priation of his dust. A fearful, anxious question pressed 


70 THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 

ever on his feelings : If this grave were to he the grave 
of hope ? But it was only man that was wholly ruined 
by the fall. Poets have written of nature’s sympathies 
with the event, such as were manifest when Christ 
yielded up his life on Calvary. But in the days of the 
fall no such manifestations in nature attended the 
scene. True, man was driven out of Eden, and its gate 
was guarded against his return. The garden itself 
seems to have withered to desolation. Like the tran¬ 
sient purity of Adam in his primitive days, it departed 
as a dream, and has been seen no more. Never again 
has it figured in the world’s history as an existing real¬ 
ity. But the earth, though rugged and wild, would 
still yield its fruits to reward the hand of cultivation 
and to sustain man in being for almost a thousand 
years. The goodness of Cod was not changed by the 
fall of man. Cod deferred the penalty pronounced on 
sin, for all those long years and centuries, and even to 
the next world in a measure, when the judgment shall 
show that the benevolence of Cod and the power of his 
grace have been exercised in vain in behalf of the im¬ 
penitent. 

Cod’s own world was still man’s habitation, yielding 
its fruits, its flowers, and its harvests as a reward for 
human toil. Nor was man left without a promise of 
blessings. The seed of the woman was to bruise the 
serpent’s head. The great and subtle tempter was at 
length to be conquered by Christ in the nature of man, 
who was to triumph as man on earth and as the Lord 
of earth and heaven. 

Thus the dark day, so clouded with sin, so fearful in its 
experiences, yet revealed afar off and through the future 
of ages the day then to come of light, and glory, and 


FALLEN MAN ON PRIMITIVE PROBATION. 


71 


peace to the fallen and the lost: man was yet a proba¬ 
tioner. The smile of God was not forever gone. In 
this life man might yet have peace, and hope might yet 
illumine the path of his pilgrimage ; death might not 
he death for evermore, but only a dark valley through 
which was made to pass the path to Zion’s hill—ce¬ 
lestial Zion, overcanopied with skies of gold, with cities 
wrought in pearl, where angels dwell, and God is the 
light of the scene. 

Thus we have the practical teaching of this great 
subject, that the results of the fall, though great and 
fearful, were yet mitigated by the divine mercy; they 
were less than the strict deserts of the primitive sin. 
Yet the judgments invoked stand out as warnings to 
transgressors, and so become the ministers of correction 
and reform. 

Man died to holiness, and yet he lived to hope. The 
tempter inducing the sin did not wholly secure his 
prey. In the promise of a coming Saviour a day for 
repentance was given to fallen man, and toil imposed 
as one of the fruits of sin, was made conducive not only 
to the benefit of the sinner, but of all God’s creatures 
on earth. It became the patron and godfather of vir¬ 
tue, and a teacher of truth and faith in God. Sodom 
luxuriated in vice, debauchery, idleness, and crime, 
while virtue dwelt in the mountains. Abraham, pursu¬ 
ing the hardy toil of nomadic mountain life, was faithful 
to God as well as compassionate toward the doomed city. 

Besides, by the sweat of his brow man eat bread, 
sustained his life, prolonged his days, and made his op¬ 
portunities his probation for repentance and accept¬ 
ance with God. Fallen man, when he sees how vile 
and sinful he is, feels that his birthplace and his pil- 


72 THE BIBLE IN HARHONY WITH NATURE. 

grimage have been remote from Eden, that a great and 
solemn change in his affections and his acts must be 
wrought in his heart to fit him to walk with God in 
his own paradise. 

But the light of the true promises, in and through 
the Son of God, is not a far-off, uncertain shimmer in 
the darkness of coming ages, but a light revealed, a 
shining, glorious flame on Zion’s hill. Yea, salvation 
is the light of faith to-day as it illumined all the ages 
gone, and, made the tent-lives of the old patriarchs the 
homes of God on earth. Salvation is proclaimed to all 
the world; so he that will may come again, and walk 
in Eden’s bowers—come penitent for the past, rejoicing 
now for pardoned sin, and hoping for a home, a life, a 
rest beyond the grave. 

But the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise 
is a significant figure of the divine judgment against 
impenitent transgressors. God will, at the last, banish 
from his celestial paradise all the impenitent and vile to 
a way more desolate, a land more terrible than was be¬ 
fore the footsteps of Adam—to a darkness without a 
ray, a gloom without hope, a horror and remorse be¬ 
yond probation or relief. All who turn away from God 
in this life will so be turned away in the day of the last 
judgment. Ah, who would wish to look down that 
dark way to death eternal ! But we will not dwell on 
the despair of the lost. Let the exhortation to turn 
our feet toward the heavenly Zion, while life and hope 
are not yet gone, be heard and heeded. Then all will 
be well, whether the midnight cry of death shall sum¬ 
mon us away or the trumpet that shall summon the 
dead to judgment shall be the knell of our departure 
from this life ! 



THE GOSPEL AND CIVILIZATION. 


73 


THE GOSPEL AND CIVILIZATION. 

“ And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” 

Bev. 22 :2. 

The fact of divine revelation is a great and sublime 
fact. But it is something more than a phenomenon for 
the admiration of an intelligent universe. It has an 
office connected with the welfare of man. It comes as 
a means to an end. The degeneracy, degradation, and 
wretchedness of the race are more or less visible in all 
lands. Revelation as a system of truth comes to such 
with healing power. We witness its work, and if we ap¬ 
preciate it truly we need no better evidence that its 
teaching is divine. Let history present us the growth 
of Christian nations, and their developed civilization 
growing through the ages, in contrast with the pagan 
world, and if by their fruits we may know them, we have 
here a demonstrated illustration of the power of divine 
truth in healing the nations. In other words, we have 
before us emphasized proofs of our holy religion. Reve¬ 
lation is so shown to be an expression of the divine 
sympathy for fallen man—of sympathy with a purpose 
to lift up the race from their depravity and sin, and to 
establish them in the pursuit of virtue and holiness ; to 
give man peace in the place of wretchedness and sorrow, 
health for moral sickness, and hope in the place of 
despair ; to transform the world from the darkness of 
moral death to the light of celestial day. Pity to the 
poor, forlorn heart, shut out from the appreciations of 
the divine office of revelation, and of the new condi¬ 
tions it opens up to man, the gospel is indeed the 
leaves of the tree of life that are for the healing of the 
nations ! 


74 THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 

“ The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the 
nations.” To know of the future of man is everywhere 
a matter of anxious, earnest interest with the race ; not 
simply what may be on the morrow, but what of man’s 
future beyond this life. 

In the course of about thirty years a generation of the 
human family passes away. To what end have they 
lived ? A vast pilgrim army has one by one fallen out 
of life’s rugged way, till the last man has laid down on 
the arid sands, and left his bones to bleach unburied. 

We contemplate the picture, and ask ourselves to what 
intent has this multitude lived ? The story of a gen¬ 
eration of Hebrew pilgrims to the promised land dying 
in the wilderness suggests the same inquiry. Hath this 
world fitting compensations for the toils, the sufferings, 
and the sorrows of its people ? If so, why do we hear 
the complaint so often of dissatisfaction with this 
world’s experiences, and the dark forebodings of evils 
to come to blot out the sunshine of our days ? 


THE BIBLE AND ITS MISSIONARY TEACHERS. 

MISSIONARY ADDRESS TO OUR SABBATH-SCHOOL. 

In man’s best estate the conviction comes home to 
his judgment that if this world is his only reward he 
lives as a toiling slave in the midst of danger and 
death ; that he lives in vain if the sundown of his life 
precedes the shadows of eternal night. For, if all the 
precious memories endeared to the heart by life and its 
experiences are but shadows fading to oblivion, then 
surely is our life in vain, and all our conceptions of the 



THE BIBLE AND ITS MISSIONARY TEACHERS. 75 


beautiful and sublime in nature and in man are as 
mockeries. How sad is the human soul, how degraded 
the human character, restricted to the state and condi¬ 
tion of mere animal existence, and bereft of the pros¬ 
pects and prestige of a future life ? Indeed, exclude 
the idea of immortality for man, and how pitiable is his 
condition ! 

To find examples of such a status, anterior to the 
thought of a future life, if man ever existed in such 
condition, we must go back to the cave-dwellers of the 
stone age, and to the lake-dwellers, who scarcely had . 
capacities or facilities to support a famished existence. 
These were the degenerate sons of sin, and no doubt of 
Adam born, or succeeding him as their pristine father. 
The scientist, who boasts of exhuming their fossil 
bones, has brought up also the fossil records of their 
state of being—the lives and habits of ruthless beasts of 
prey ! Philosophy has not speculated whether any of 
these had the faintest shadow of a religious idea ? If 
they had such ideas, were they not associated with cru¬ 
elty and crime, and made the cloak and sanction of acts 
most fatal and damning? For critical observers of 
human conditions show us when men in the darkness 
of heathen degeneracy come to the conception of what 
they esteem religious thought or sentiment, the darkest 
passions of the soul are developed to active forces—hate 
becomes active persecution, and cruelty and blood are 
held as in grateful favor by the demon god who com¬ 
mands their worship. In such a heart no fires of love 
support a kindred flame, but all is dark and devilish. 

Woden, the ancient god of heathen Europe, led his 
fierce, wild, savage votaries through all the deep black 
forests that embowered his kingdoms, to altars in the 


76 THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 

darkest depths of forest lands, on which were burned, 
on all great state occasions, human sacrifices to the idol 
god. Men in those remote dark ages seem to have been 
bred as ogres , whose forest paths bore marks of blood, 
whose homes were seats of cruelty and crime—of crime 
remorseless, dark, and damning. The old stories told 
to frighten babies—of “Bluebeard/’ of “Jack the 
Giant-Killer,” and the like—were in their originals liv¬ 
ing characters in those old heathen days. They are 
shadows of the past that have surv'ved the ages. But 
what could immortality and the thought of a future 
life bring of peace to the human soul so wrought in the 
dark cruelties of heathen prestige and superstition ? If 
to these old heathen came the dreams of another life, it 
was of such a life as would hold high carnival to Thor 
and Woden in the spirit land ! 

The demon genii of those dark days flitted, as it were, 
from land to land, and were thought to haunt the 
homes and paths of men, from what has since been 
known as the black forests of Germany to the frozen 
zone. Europe was all one dark place, filled with the 
habitations of cruelty. Not only is an existence, then, 
in a future life the soul’s necessity, but an existence all 
unlike the heathen’s paradise—a future life of light and 
joy and peace and love. 

The paradise of the aborigines of the Western world 
is not more pure than that of the ancient gods of 
heathen Europe. Their heaven was but the perpetual 
succession or repetition of their earthly crimes. The 
human mind, so filled with dreams of triumphs in 
crime and cruelty, was not content with the phantoms 
of a paradise to come. There are evidences of like char¬ 
acteristics among all heathen nations. The interests of 


THE BIBLE AND ITS MISSIONARY TEACHERS. 77 


heathenism were on earth, and it sought to demonstrate 
itself by examples of ambition, pride, and power. 

Forgetting a coming life, men small and great have 
sought in monuments of earth and stone to prove to 
the world that they have lived ; that they had a sort of 
distinction above their fellows in their day. They sought 
an immortality, but it was in this earth only. They 
sought to live in monuments of earth and brass and 
stone. The mound-builders in America, the Montezu- 
mas in Mexico, the Aztecs in Peru, as well as the 
Druids in our fatherland, sought alike this earthly im¬ 
mortality. But the day and deeds sought in these va¬ 
rious monuments to be preserved are lost to human 
memory. The very names of their projectors have per¬ 
ished. So of the monuments of Egypt. 

“Was Cheops or Cephrenes architect of either of 
the pyramids that bear their names ?’ ’ These struc¬ 
tures had neither military adaptation nor economical 
utility. They are still there, but those who planned 
and constructed them and conscripted the bodies and 
souls of millions in their erection have perished from 
the knowledge of the race. The old heathen temples 
in Egypt and classic lands, erected at such vast expense 
of life and treasure, are alike significant of heathen 
folly. Greece and Rome and the great heathen king¬ 
doms of the earth, in all their great public works and 
classic lore, are but significant of the interior life of 
the heathen world. 

There was, indeed, a civilization in Athens. But 
though it made a show of patriotism and cultivated lit¬ 
erature and song, its civilization had no moral qualities 
except of debasement. Socrates, the wisest of its phi¬ 
losophers, is said to have believed in the future exist- 


78 THE BIBLE IK HARMOKY WITH HATURE. 

ence of the human soul; but to what end it scarcely ap¬ 
pears—whether for sojourn in Dante’s circles of the 
damned, or with capacity for converse with the spirits 
of philosophers, we do not know. He seems to have 
mastered the thought that the soul’s existence is not 
dependent on matter or material entities to rehabilitate 
it with the faculties of life and thought and conscious 
being. But how dismal and gloomy and desolate was 
the future eternity as opened up to man by this Grecian 
philosopher ? Rome, boasting a more solid literature 
and greater advances in civilization, scarcely compre¬ 
hended the philosophy of Socrates. Cicero, the grand¬ 
est of her orators and statesmen, said in substance that 
the immortality of the soul was rather a matter of de¬ 
sire than a fact proved. 

But all these conceits of heathen philosophy and the 
rites of heathen worship left the masses in ignorance, 
superstition, and slavery. In Rome, with its proud 
temples, its amphitheatres, its Parthenon, and all the 
boasted glories of its land, the masses of the people 
were slaves. Gaius, in his Institutes of Roman Law, 
written about the year 150 of the Christian era, shows 
us the conditions to which the people were born. The 
son was in the power of the father while the father 
lived. He might order him scourged or put to death 
without the intervention of the civil law. And if the 
mother were a slave, then he followed her condition 
until emancipated under the forms prescribed by the 
statute. With these iron elements of subjugation, the 
frightful degeneracy of morals under this ancient civili¬ 
zation found one of its occasions. 

We may also refer to the facilities for divorce allowed 
by the Roman law. By certain forms and proclama' 


THE BIBLE AND ITS MISSIONARY TEACHERS. 79 


tions, either party might, in the presence of a prescribed 
number of witnesses, dissolve the marriage, without the 
intervention of any court, or any consideration of the 
cause of the separation. The husband having the wife 
subject to his power, according to the theory of the 
law, in sending her out of his house was not bound to 
state any cause for the act. In addition to the corrupt* 
ing influence of the pagan worship, corruption was thus 
engendered in the domestic relations of society, under 
the very forms of law. Your modern free-lovers, who 
talk of affinities between the sexes to justify a degen¬ 
erate life, are not the advanced social scientists they 
claim themselves to be. The same propositions, to the 
same purposes and results, were equally convenient to 
justify pagan debaucheries ages ago, as with this mod¬ 
ern school. Advanced indeed ! in going back to antiq¬ 
uity, and repeating not only its rationale of degen¬ 
eracy, but acting out its vices and crimes. If from the 
consideration of these general conditions of pagan soci¬ 
ety we scan the particular life of the individual 
heathen, we find that in the individual which makes up 
in association the aggregate sufferings of the heathen 
condition. 

Let the condition of the heathen women be consid¬ 
ered, investigated, and understood, and the impression 
comes home to the heart of the sad condition to which 
they are subjected. Ignorant, debased, enslaved, and sub¬ 
jected to restraints and punishments from the brutal 
husband, with a darkness around her that may be felt, 
which no moral ray seems capable of penetrating, she 
becomes the subject of despair, and dies in the hope of 
escaping the tyranny of home. 

Thus we take a hasty view of the broad fields of pagan 


80 THE BIBLE IH HARMOHY WITH HATUKE. 

darkness which calls for the light of the gospel. The 
hearts and the homes of the pagan world present such 
examples of wretchedness as should awaken the benevo¬ 
lent sympathies of angels and Christian men. 

I have given you an outline sketch of the heathen 
world as it was and is and will remain unless it be 
changed by the power of the gospel. This is the field 
for whose reclamation from despair and death our holy 
religion is appointed. Divine revelation is God’s ap¬ 
pointed light to lead the way from conditions so debased 
and seemingly so dark and hopeless to a state of hope 
and peace and rejoicing love. Revelation , in its devel¬ 
opment of the will and truth of God, is not a develop¬ 
ment in the evolution of earthly being, but is of the 
Lord from heaven. The character revealed in the at¬ 
tributes divine of Jehovah are primary original facts 
subsisting in God, operating in developing moral influ¬ 
ence over men by a primary original force proceeding 
from the divine throne. It may seem a most remarka¬ 
ble feature of divine revelation that it sets before us not 
only a harmonious system of divine law, but an economy 
of grace that proceeds on the same rationale of divine 
benevolence to-day, as in the first obscure promise to 
fallen man. By whatever incidents God’s revealed 
truth may have been surrounded, seemingly for the 
time giving color to the heavenly message, these inci¬ 
dents of clouded skies did not corrupt the light from 
beyond. And when through rifts in the clouds the 
celestial sunlight found its way to the hearts of men, 
the eternal majesty and love of Jehovah impressed their 
transcripts on human souls. The powers of darkness 
have held high carnival in hostility to all that is good 
and lovely in the divine economy. But more in love 


THE BIBLE AND ITS MISSIONARY TEACHERS. 81 


than in terror has the faithful soul greeted our Divine 
Father, feeling that in him was peace and hope and 
protection from sin and its persecutions, its influence, 
and destruction. In the sunshine of the divine counte¬ 
nance Enoch went up to the skies ; Noah entered into 
the ark ; God’s bow was set in the cloud when the 
floods were gone ; Abraham came a pilgrim to a strange 
land ; Jacob wrestled with the angel and prevailed ; 
Moses received to his countenance a divine illumination 
from the divine presence at Sinai; Miriam sung the 
victory of God over Egypt’s dark sea ; and Deborah 
celebrated in song the death of Sisera, the oppressor, 
by the light of the same inspiration. Nor were the 
features of divine, developed truth distorted in the 
strange association of Ezekiel’s visions. His images of 
brass and iron and clay, when they had served their 
office, crumbled down to dust; the concentric circles of 
flying wheels vanished from vision, and the great army 
raised up to life from the dry bones of the valley per¬ 
formed its mission and retired again to nameless graves. 
But God’s truth, by all such changes, was neither modi¬ 
fied, obscured, nor changed. The three devout servants 
of God that sustained a salamander life in the livid 
flames added no glory to oracles divine. These sing¬ 
ing saints took up the refrain of David’s songs as they 
triumphed in deliverance from the rage of a pagan 
king. So Daniel in the den of lions rehearsed his 
prayers, looking away toward Jerusalem, from his mem¬ 
ory of the liturgy of the temple worship. 

In Old Testament history it often transpired that the 
records of the law and of the Jewish worship were so 
long forgotten that they died out from the memory of 
the people. But when the recorded truth was again 


82 THE BIBLE IH HARMOHY WITH HATURE. 

brought to the knowledge of the people it was the same 
old story of compassion, light, and love. In fact, in all 
of divine revelation, from the record by Moses to the 
end of St. John’s visions, we see parts of the one great 
whole that impersonates the divine in its relations to 
the great human family. In the Old Testament dis¬ 
pensation the roots only may seem to have been ger¬ 
minating that at length produced the tree of life. Still 
there were developed characters in all those olden times 
that reflected the divine. As the good man in the first 
Psalm, who was like a tree planted by the river, whose 
lSaf did not wither, and whatever he did prospered, so 
of the distinguished servants of God cited by St. Paul 
in his Epistle to the Hebrews, who lived and died in 
faith, and attained to the resurrection of the just. 

But in the dispensation of the gospel came in the 
great affirmative power of divine benevolence, to re¬ 
generate and new create an apostate and depraved world 
—such a world and such people as paganism has pre¬ 
sented to our consideration in the former part of this 
address. But I need not rehearse to you the Saviour’s 
life and ministry on earth, nor that of the apostles. 
These are the topics to be considered in our weekly les¬ 
sons. But the gospel in its developed power on earth is 
sustained not only by the integrity and truth of God, 
but it develops a progressive increase and growth that 
assumes the great world as its field of conquest and tri¬ 
umph. John in his visions saw the pure river of the 
water of life proceeding out of the throne of God and 
the Lamb. This river was indeed a symbol of the gos¬ 
pel, originating with God and Christ and flowing abroad 
and imparting to desolate and famished nations the ele¬ 
ments of celestial character and being. On the bank 


THE BIBLE AND ITS MISSIONARY TEACHERS. 83 

of this river was the tree of life hearing twelve manners 
of fruit, and yielding its fruit every month ; and the 
leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. 
Christ was the great physician, and his great remedy 
was and is the leaves of the tree nurtured by the river 
of the waters of life—nurtured by God’s eternal truth, 
imparted from his divine throne. It only remains to 
refer you briefly to what God has wrought through 
this gospel, whose office and influence is the subject of 
our weekly studies. But we cannot tell one of the 
thousand changes realized through this truth during 
the eighteen hundred years since the death of Christ on 
Calvary wrought the great atonement that is the basis 
of our faith and hopes. This would involve the re¬ 
hearsal of the history of all these centuries. I can only 
ask you to contrast the state of men and nations under 
the pagan regime with the Christian civilized world at 
the present hour. Though the change has been partial 
and imperfect, yet in its length and breadth, height 
and depth, there is enough realized to illustrate the 
glory of the gospel, and to give assurance of the coming 
millennium. How different is the domestic home of the 
ancient and even modern pagan from the home of the 
Christian ! Contrast the Christian wife and mother, 
held to a high intellectual refinement and the moral 
culture of our blessed religion, with deep womanly 
affection and a kindly charity shining out in her sanc¬ 
tified nature, with a high appreciation of her destiny 
and duty—I say, contrast such a woman with the 
heathen wife and mother I have pictured to you, and 
the difference is as clearly marked and seen as the light 
of a beautiful summer morn in contrast with a night of 
storms and darkness. In all the highways and byways 


84 THE BIBLE IH HARMOHY WITH HATURE. 

of life the light of the gospel has impressed its image 
and beauty on the hearts of true and faithful Chris¬ 
tians, in discrimination from the gay and worldly and 
wicked. Think of it : a sin-sick and depressed world, 
when the gospel shall complete the office to which it 
was appointed, shall be brought up from its degradation, 
shall be healed from its maladies, and partake of the 
water of eternal life. The leaves of the tree that im¬ 
personates divine revelation shall heal the nations. 

We see how good men and good women, live, as re¬ 
flecting in their sentiments and deeds of charity the 
divine, and we may contemplate their last hours with our 
grief subdued by the faith of Jesus and the light of the 
divine promises. It is not all of life to live, nor all of 
death to die. Earthly honors to the dead are of but 
little account where the shadows of the grave shut out 
the light of eternity. But what is the heaven promised 
by the oracles of paganism ? Bring out its images, and 
see through their hideous forms the social existence and 
degraded conditions of heathen gods. And if they are 
so demoniac in being and character, what can be said 
of their worshippers, and what of the social state they 
promise in a coming life ? Let them tell their own story 
of hideous spirits, human hate, and depraved passions, 
and you will need no earnest orthodox preacher to un¬ 
cover or to paint the fires of hell. 

But the gospel’s power is seen to better purpose in 
the character it imparts to its votaries. The good 
man’s life and the good man’s death are as living wit¬ 
nesses to the truth of Jesus. They show the blessed 
Redeemer living in the soul, guiding the life, and as a 
divine presence in the chamber of sorrow and death. 
Your Christian brother and your Christian sister have 


CONCLUSION. 


85 


often shown evidence of a calm, complacent faith in 
their departure to the spirit world. And in view of 
their death, surely you can exclaim with the heathen 
prophet, as he looked on God’s people, “ Let me die 
the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like 
his.” What more blessed duty can be offered toman 
than the study of the gospel and the teaching its office 
and power to a suffering world ? 


CONCLUSION. 

In special topics germane to the harmony of nature 
with the Bible or divine revelation, we have labored to 
present the great points of interest involved in this 
work. The specious, illogical views and crude notions 
of Thomas Paine have been briefly considered ; and 
the infidel theories of Froude, who bears the garb of a 
churchman, and which he seeks by his refined style and 
reputation for literary culture to foist on the Christian 
world, have been discussed and exposed as warring 
with demonstrated necessities of divine government 
and providence and the kingdom of divine grace. The 
primitive creation by a divine hand with a divine pur¬ 
pose is considered as essential to the theories of the 
naturalist, and the only conceivable origin of life and 
of human endowments. These points are illustrated by 
views of the scientists and the man of the Bible. We 
have copied a brief address to a Sunday-school as against 
the prevailing infidelity, also a chapter showing that 
infidelity is not a natural condition of the human mind. 
And then we have illustrated by several discussions the 
office work of Christianity, as a progressive agency in 



86 


THE BIBLE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE. 


the elevation of man and the growth of civilization. 
Man’s relation to God, under sin, is illustrated by his 
expulsion from Eden and his probation for penitence 
and duty, during nine hundred and thirty years. To 
aid our conceptions of the exercise of the divine creative 
power, two poems are inserted—the first reclaimed by 
the author from an old publication, the other the 
“ Oratorio of Creation,” never before having been 
printed. Though varied topics are herein considered, 
but one subject runs through these pages—the developed 
glory of revelation as cast over the field of nature, or 
the universe under celestial illuminations. As the great 
facts combined in the system of the universe embrace 
eternity as their counterparts, they are not the subjects 
of specific demonstration to finite minds, but are mat¬ 
ters for experience and knowledge in a coming eternity. 
But they are none the less true, and we are not depend¬ 
ent alone on blind faith for our conceptions of them. 
The necessities for their being are demonstrable, and 
the moral evidences calling for their office and purposes 
are overwhelming. Stars hid in the depth of nature 
from the creation were believed to exist as causes of 
phenomena of known planets, noted by astronomers 
centuries before they were brought within the limit of 
telescopic vision, yet these philosophers died with assured 
convictions of their existence as if they had seen them. 
So the phenomena of life and nature demonstrate neces¬ 
sities to be realized in a coming world, as well as the di¬ 
vine supervision of the life that now is. 

A single glance at what the world would be if the 
Bible were struck out of existence, Christianity annihi¬ 
lated, the moral law abrogated, and the infidel’s scheme 
of human society were established in its place, is suffi- 


CiWCLUSIOH. 


87 


cienfc to convince any rational mind that the office of 
the Bible is in harmony with purity and the well-being 
of man. The French Kevolution showed what infidelity 
in power would do for humanity in contrast with the 
beneficent work of Christianity in the world. The ques¬ 
tion has often been asked, If men are so wicked with re¬ 
ligion, what would they be without it ? and the answer 
to such question by close observers of human society is 
pertinent and significant. The forces which shape the 
life and fortunes of men, when truly appreciated, will 
answer such question. 

This subject is of interest to those whose lives are 
passing away, where the convictions of observation 
and experience open up to the soul the visions of im¬ 
mortality. As this world fades from vision and the 
valley of the shadow of death intervenes, the celestial 
illumination from beyond comes through the darkness, 
and inspires in the soul a prestige of its celestial life 
and joys. 

In youth we often feel that it is manly to hold opin¬ 
ions in defiance of settled authorities ; but age com¬ 
mends the teachings of experience, and to have led a re¬ 
ligious life is at last a satisfaction to the soul. Com¬ 
mending this thought to my youthful friends, I bid them 
an affectionate farewell. 
































V 






•* 




•• 





» 










- 










I 




















< 























































































/ 


I 






























• f 











♦ 









































* 








v* V 


x 0 ^ 


O A 
o' . o J \0 ' 
s * * r, 5 N 

A ' ^ jV <?- 

A* ^ 
^ A * 



<>* v 

oo ■ 



0 •; 



v v 

\V </> 


- 42 ^*= 



*1 


°o,^ ' y r^ 0 ^,cu 

—> v' A>AA ,**\» 

'c a a 'Jjfe-A ** -*|j 

^ .•./ ^ *ym* ** % *J 

‘ A v °o G °V A*, A A °\ 

A v ® ; o o x * ^ > 

* . ■ j * A o >■ 

a. <-<*y//i\)-j& 4 \v v. , %JA\nA > _ * ^tVJl/-^ * 

r~> .^jU' * o.- ^ j. Vvi~ « A Q_ *• . ^ .■% ,>sjg 

’©V » a . a * \v * 0 N o ’ ^ * 9 i ^ A | 

v * 0 /■ *c> • V x . S s * A > AA * H * 0 /- V V X vr 


\°°^ 





& A^. ** ° 
s 4 s ^ Aa ^ ^ 

,o ©* >- ^ 


%/ ;M\,# ;i 

° wWw * 4^^- w3^ " -4*^ M 

<?■ v ' iX’ ^5 “ - <x, * * y> <?* ■-> 4*1 

- ^ % „ _ . ^ A . <3 '', ^ • s 



o » ^ ’ A , ^ 

A X c 0 K c * ^ o 

<T> a o^cx_ X O 

,-i' 


^ V 


* , °^. ^ 0 N 0 N aC)° 

*f > <<y 

,j> A^ ■ ^ 

c 5 ^ tcCvs 

<<* x> 




® aV <f> 

J* $ * 

x * A ^ s s ' A 

A X c° N G . *bA" , 0 V - vl • « 

A ^ c 

■Vv O /IN 


0 «' • ,o <&' . JL- ■ - —• . 

^ 9 i A * 

^ * 0 ^ A Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 

Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Ar> \v Treatment Date: August 2005 

s ^ PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 







\W- o 
. % a 


^ T^JJ'. . CT > ^ 

%'* 7 f»s£° v 

v .''•; »■* > * .o v »’ *«, % 

% / - 


•>* V 

o o 




dt^/if/S/*? <p nV *. c\v\\V*.v ./. v n 

g? - +■*- $ 


4- •*+ • 

, 0 ° 


\° -°t. 



* <>* v *- 

o o x 

. <- .,. ^ ^ ^ * 

y' <5^ > ' XKyi ~' 42 ry) C‘ \ <r ^' J: y o, X "7> 

^ y) k *' * V v x s* 

y «. «^. ^ <^ <l -^J 

***,/ 

2 



* %ft« 



v> ^ 


* <\V </> 

* AV </\ " n 

A- ^ 

y 0 * X. * /\ O X/ y s S < 0^ 

,<*> C 0 N c * c& * ' 1 fi * "<o 

* ^SNs <* O C> v N -W-2_ 1 ' 

A *. a£a\\W ^ v * ti&n!//?-, 2 , •? 





r* 

%. 



it < ) / 

* ^ jy * v ** 0 ^ 

<* /A ^ O- 

</ 



o 

O ~,r> ^Y> 

° V* "%., ” 'VJ^AK * ,\' 

* A * "V €*V * ■ ^ . ,^„ 

^.'.O A& .,, C y "*‘\ v \ A „n c ,%* 
oO'v- 1 ?*, ^ .# AjLj*^°o 

- 3 A u ~0 ♦ !|1 '>' 

9 1 ^ y s s *« 
































